The Forbidden City

by Deborah A. Wolf

  Down the lionsnake’s gullet.

  So vivid was this image that when the passageway swooped open all at once, falling away on either side, under his feet, and above his head, Daru gasped and stepped back.

  I have reached the snake’s belly, he thought, and though he knew that was silly, still it was everything he could do to slide his bare foot forward. His toes found a sharp edge, and nothing beyond. It might be a staircase, he thought, and he was heartened at the thought that somebody had built these tunnels, after all, and likely they had not all died down here.

  Then again, maybe it was the belly of a giant stone snake, filled with acid and the bones of foolish young boys.

  “Pakka,” he whispered, jogging his bad arm a tiny bit. Ow. “Pakka, wake up. I need your light.”

  “Pip-pip,” she chirruped sleepily. Standing on his arm, she did her best. There was a slight tik as her light appeared, and the barest hint of heat. It was faint and sickly, and Daru feared what the effort might cost her. Nevertheless, it was enough.

  A wide stairway stretched down ahead of him, and to either side farther than Pakka’s little bug-light could reach. The steps were as sharp and new as if they had just that day been cut into the living rock, and little gold motes swam in the depths of the dragonstone so that as he took a hesitant step, then another, it seemed to Daru as if he trod upon a star-filled sky.

  The steps were wide and shallow, as if they, like the tunnel, had been built with children in mind. It was not, somehow, a comforting thought. When had the plain gray stone become dragonstone? He did not know. It seemed that they had journeyed far beneath the fortress, perhaps to the very heart of the world.

  I am not in the belly of a snake after all, he thought. I am in the belly of the dragon. That was not a comforting thought, either.

  Just as his legs began to shake the stairs came to an end. He sat down on the last one to gather his thoughts, and to comfort Pakka, whose light had begun to flicker and dim in an alarming way. He was tired, sore tired, and he hurt everywhere. And he was hungry, and…

  “I am stronger than they think,” he told the shadows as he pushed himself to stand on legs as wobbly as a newborn foal’s. The shadows very much wanted him to lie down, and to sleep, to sleeeeeep, and so he knew that it would be the death of him, no matter how his body begged for rest. Rest, and something to eat—even lionsnake pemmican, yuck, something to drink, and a warm fire. A kind voice, a hand pushing the hair back from his forehead.

  I miss Dreamshifter, he thought, and his eyes went so big and round with the revelation that by all rights he should have been able to see in the dark. Looking back, he could remember times when he was ill, or when his apprentice’s training had drained him past the point of exhaustion. Dreamshifter would tuck him into bed, bring him bone broth and bread with honey, and sometimes she would be humming a little song, just like—

  Like a mother, he thought. If stone can be said to be a mother, then I am not such an orphan after all. It made him smile, and it made him pause. What would Dreamshifter do?

  She would tear a hole between worlds, walk through Shehannam, and emerge again wherever she wanted, lips red with the heartsblood of her enemies and a mouth full of new stories for him. He sighed and his shoulders slumped again.

  All right, what would the dreamshifter’s apprentice do? He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, though it was not strictly speaking necessary, and gathered his thoughts up. Besides his knives, and his Pakka, and sheer tenacity, thoughts were his only asset at the moment. But he was a smart boy, and stronger than they knew.

  First things first.

  What was his most pressing problem?

  I am hungry, his stomach growled.

  We are blind, his eyes wept.

  It hurts, his everything whined. It all hurts.

  Sleep, the shadows sang.

  “Shut up!” Daru yelled, jumping as his voice echoed back. He was in a chamber, then, or a cave of some sort.

  My main problem, the one from which all others are spawned, he realized, is that I do not know where I am. I know where I wish to be—safe in my bed in Dreamshifter’s rooms—but I do not know where I am. If I figure out where I am, I can figure out how to get to where I need to be, and then I will be safe.

  You will never be safe, the shadows hissed. Never be—

  “Fuck off,” he snapped, then giggled in shock to hear such a word come out of his own mouth. “Goatfuckers!”

  The shadows had nothing to say to that.

  So. First figure out where I am. He squinted into the gloom, and shuffled sideways along the bottom step. It seemed to Daru that if he was in a room, or a cavern of sorts, finding the walls and scooting along them would be a wiser choice than running headlong into the middle. For all he knew there could be a pit of snakes, waiting for him to tumble in headfirst, or a hole without end, or a lake filled with slimy blind things, slimy blind hungry things, or—

  He tripped over his own feet and found the wall he had been seeking, smashing nose-first into the merciless rock. His teeth snapped together on the tip of his tongue, and his busted arm was jolted so hard that stars danced in the darkness before his eyes. Not the stars for which he had wished. Pakka tumbled from the crook of his arm with a tiny skreeee and her light pulsed like a weak heartbeat as she fluttered to the ground.

  “Fuck,” Daru said again, then decided that it would be better not to fall into the habit of cursing. It would not do, he supposed, to survive the belly of the dragon only to face Dreamshifter’s wrath. He groped along the wall with his good hand, wiggling his nose a little in case it might be broken—he thought not—holding his injured arm as close as he could, and trying not to whimper under his breath.

  I am stronger than they know, his mind whispered, but I am still just a boy.

  Daru could see Pakka’s light bobbing higher and higher as she skittered up the wall and then stopped, screeching and doing a funny little wiggle-dance of excitement. Heart in his mouth, he reached out to touch… a branch? Some sort of tree branch? When it did not bite him, Daru wrapped his fingers most of the way around the length of wood and drew closer, peering against the gloom.

  Not a branch, he decided, it was too smooth for that. Something handmade. A club, perhaps, or… He ran his hand up the length and encountered a bundle of rags, tightly wrapped and sticky with foul-smelling pitch. Oh! He thought, and was so overcome with elation his head swam. He lifted the object from its metal bracket and hugged it as if it were his best friend in all the world.

  “A torch!” he shouted. “A torch! I have a torch! Good girl, Pakka!” Daru swayed on his feet, pain and all, nearly dancing in his excitement. “Now all I have to do is light… oh.” And his heart sank, down from the blue sky to join him in the belly of the dragon, and further still. All he had was his knives, his clothes, his bird-skull flute, and his Pakka. He could not light a fire with those.

  Still, it was more than he had possessed a moment before, and he straightened a bit with a sigh. Pakka chirruped again, questioning as she crawled onto his shoulder.

  “You are a good girl,” he reassured her, stroking her cheek with his. “I just wish I had something to light it with. Maybe if I find another one, we could rub them together and make fire?” It was a doubtful proposition, but still, it was something.

  “Pip-pip-peeeee-oh!” Pakka skreeked, bobbing up and down. “Peeee-oh!” Chittering to herself she all but ran back down his arm, and he couldn’t feel her any more. “Peee-eee-oh!” Her light reappeared, bobbed this way and that, this way and that, this way and—

  There was another tik, a spark, and Daru jumped so that he almost dropped the torch.

  Another spark, and another. Then it dawned upon him.

  “Fire!” he yelled, as a tiny green flame licked at the pitch and found it to its liking. “Fire!” he said again, as Pakka ran back up his arm to crouch upon his shoulder, pipping and peeee-ohing with delight at his reaction. “Pakka, you made fire! Oh, clever, beautiful girl.�
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  Fire raced up the head of the torch, bathing them in a warm, welcome glow and a bitter tang of bitumen and burnt metal. Daru stopped his dancing, half holding his breath for fear he might put it out again. It was a strong light, though, pure and good as if Akari Sun Dragon himself had reached down from the heavens to give one small boy a morsel of hope. Daru looked away from the fire at last, blinking the shadows from his eyes, and gasped at what he saw.

  There was no endless hole, no pit of snakes. There was no dark lake full of slimy things waiting to gobble his bones. Nor had he come to a cave, as he had feared, an end to all things with no way out but death.

  Daru stood in a chamber so large that even his torch did not light all the way to the ceiling, or the far end of the room. There were tables and chairs of dark stone, wearing layers of dust and cobwebs. Carved into the walls from floor to ceiling were shelves, and more shelves, and more, row upon row of them, and each groaning under the weight of hundreds and hundreds of…

  “Books,” he gasped, and he took a deep breath filled with the musky, dusky, wonderful scent. Daru had never seen so many books in one place in all his life. Had never heard of such a collection, outside the tales of…

  “Pakka,” he squeaked, and she squeaked back. “Pakka, do you know where we are? Do you know what this is?”

  “Pip-pip-pipipip-peee?”

  “We found it,” he breathed. “We found it! Pakka, this is the Library of Kal ne Mur.”

  “Pip-pip-peeee-oh,” Pakka whistled, impressed.

  * * *

  There were a score more torches. Daru lit every one he could find, and then stood upon a low sturdy table in the middle of the vast room. He turned in a slow circle. His eyes were as large as he could make them, the better to drink in his surroundings.

  The Library of Kal ne Mur was a myth, a fable, the one place he would have given his heart to see, and here it was. A long drink of sweet water for someone with a thirst for knowledge.

  I am thirsty, he realized, and with that thought his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. Daru unhooked the water skin from his belt, allowed himself a miserly three mouthfuls, then grimaced at the stale taste. Just my luck, he thought, to find the place of my dreams and die of thirst or hunger. This place was long lost—or it never would have been called the Lost Library, he supposed—and that boded ill for a boy who hoped to find his way back to civilization, food, and a soft bed.

  “Pakka,” he said, “I have fire, and I have books, and I have you. If only I had food and water, and somewhere to sleep, I could probably live here forever.”

  “Pip-pip-tatta-tatta-treeeeeee,” his sweet little mantid agreed, and she launched herself into the air.

  “Wait!” he called, but she was already gone, a faint luminescent trail floating behind her. Daru sighed, stepped down from the table, and headed toward the nearest shelf full of books. If all roads lead to death, he supposed, I might as well die reading.

  He propped his torch carefully against the back of a chair and stood for a long moment, nose a hand’s width from the shelf, breathing it all in. There were scrolls stacked carefully on the highest shelves, some in cases of leather or wood or stiffened cloth, others tied off and left to fend for themselves. On the lower shelves he could see neat stacks of paper and vellum and papyrus, tablets of wood, bone, and ivory, and on the bottommost shelves, standing shoulder-to-shoulder like warriors prepared to do war, there were books. Codices penned and bound by hand in the long ago, stories and histories and the very thoughts of people who had walked the earth in the days of lore and legend when men were warriors, women ran the Hunt, and Sajani Earth Dragon was safely, soundly asleep.

  He sighed deep as a heart’s prayer and reached out to touch the spine of one such book, half expecting it to collapse into dust and dreams. It was as real and solid as he was. Magic, he thought. He had never imagined that a magic might exist that would allow books to remain undamaged for a thousand years or more, but what other explanation could there be? This place looked to him as if the bookkeeper had tucked her charges into place on their shelves, and wandered off to bed.

  A thousand years from now, he wondered, will they find my dry bones at one of these tables, face down in a book? It was a strangely comforting thought.

  It would take a thousand years to read all these. A thousand thousand. A thousand thousand thousand… Daru selected a book at random, a heavy woodbound codex that smelled of ink and spice. Tucking it under his good arm, he returned to the table and blew away some of the dust. I may as well get started.

  It turned out to be an accounting of crops and livestock yields. It was written in a small, neat hand, by someone named Barad ni Hameesh, in Low Suqqa, the merchants’ tongue, which was known to be less prone to change than, say, Common or Atualonian. Though it was interesting to see how the letters and language had changed through the years, it was not likely to help him in his current predicament.

  What Daru needed was a map. A map of Atukos would be a wonderful thing to find—a map of Atukos that showed where in Yosh he had gotten to, and how he might return to the surface, would be even better.

  Unless Khurra’an is still waiting to eat me. He pushed the worry away. If I get any hungrier, he thought as his stomach growled ominously, I might eat him. Among all these piles and stacks and rows of writing, surely such a map existed. And if such a map existed, Daru vowed, he would find it.

  The next three books he selected were similar works, one in the same hand, so he moved further down the row and stood on the tips of his toes to reach a higher shelf, reasoning that a map was likelier recorded in a scroll than a book. It was tricky maintaining his balance, especially with his throbbing, injured arm, but he was determined. His fingertips brushed the soft leather cover of a thin journal and he tugged it to the edge of the shelf, sticking his tongue out in concentration.

  “Pip-pip-peeeeeeeee!” Pakka shrieked in his ear. Daru fell back with a yelp, pinwheeling his good arm and smacking his broken arm bam into the books. The slim volume he had dislodged fell thwap onto his head and then rustled onto the floor, scattering pages as it went. Daru turned, scowling, with angry words in his mouth for his little friend. She hovered just out of reach, tilting her head back and forth at him and looking entirely too pleased with herself. She had blood on her mandibles, he saw, and her little bug-light pulsed merrily, stronger than it had been in some time.

  In her forelegs she clutched a very large, very dead rat.

  Daru gasped as the rat’s hind legs paddled weakly at the air. It was not very dead, after all.

  * * *

  They dined on roasted rat cooked by torchlight. Daru ate the meat, and Pakka dined neatly on the entrails. The two of them shared a handful of stale water and Daru was surprised to find himself humming contentedly under his breath. After all, he had a friend, food in his belly, and a world full of books.

  What more could he possibly want?

  A bath would be nice, he thought wistfully. A bed. He pulled the soft leather book close, laid it open, and began to read.

  * * *

  Of all the books, on all the shelves, in the greatest library in the world, this book falls into my hands. The irony and suspicious nature of it did not escape Daru. He had been stalked by shadows, apprenticed to a dreamshifter, and he had fallen down into the belly of a dragon. Such experiences did not leave a mind unmarked.

  The book was not a record of bumper crops and poor yields. Neither was it a book of love poems, or a bestiary concerning the mating habits of wyverns. It was, Daru learned within the first few pages, the diary of a young boy, written in a very old form of Atualonian.

  His name was—had been—Somnus. He hated the taste of fish, and a girl named Onassa, who was beautiful and smart and did not know he existed. It seemed to Daru, as he leaned his chin into his good hand and read past hunger and pain and exhaustion, that Somnus existed mostly in his own writing. He was unable to speak, if Daru’s translation was correct, or perhaps it was that he coul
d not speak well, and those around Somnus thought him stupid.

  Stupid and weak.

  He could be me. Daru turned another heavy page. In another lifetime, these could be my words. Somnus had been chased into the belly of the dragon not by a vash’ai, but by his own feelings of shame and fear. Deep in the Downbelow—he called it the Underside Down, which Daru found charming—he discovered cages and rooms filled with peculiar children. “Exceptional Children,” Somnus named them, and even his penned voice seemed to whisper. These were children who shouted too much or spoke too little, rocked silently in dark corners or ran wildly about, striking one another. Children who showed great promise in the realms of music, poetry—or magic.

  Children like me, weak in some ways, gifted in others. Dreamshifter warned me. The Loremaster warned me, too, and if they know about these children… Chillflesh raised painfully along the backs of Daru’s arms. If they know about these children, it means that those children who are taken are not given a good life, as the king has said, but kept down here in the Downbelow for…

  For what purpose, exactly, Daru did not know, but he knew it was not good. He had uncovered the dark secret of Atukos, or at least one of the dark secrets, and it occurred to him that a boy who was known to have discovered such a thing might very well disappear forever.

  He read on, though his eyes ached and everything else ached worse and his torch was spluttering low. There were plenty of torches on the library walls, so that was not a real worry. The fate of the exceptional children, however, and his fate should he be caught in that net, was—