Libyrinth

by Pearl North

  Clauda wrinkled her nose at the desiccated crumb. Humiliation mixed with the anger that was already warming her face. To be tended to by a Libyrarian, of all things. People like Clauda were supposed to take care of people like Selene, not the other way around. “I can feed myself. Give me that,” she said petulantly, motioning to the basket. Her hand trembled and she quickly lowered it.

  Selene gave her a skeptical look and placed the basket in her lap. She sat back on her haunches and watched as Clauda reached in, searching for an apple and spilling most of the contents of the basket before finally finding one and managing, with both hands, to draw it out. Clauda wedged it between her knees and reached for her cleaver.

  Selene drew a breath and opened her mouth as if to protest, but she caught Clauda’s glare and stopped, a raised eyebrow her only commentary.

  “Why did you bring us all the way up here when we just have to go back down again?” Clauda said obstinately, gripping the handle of the cleaver as hard as she could and lifting it to the apple.

  Selene grimaced bitterly. “We’re not going back down, we’re going up—”

  “Suck a goat!” Clauda swore as she fumbled the cleaver and nicked herself.

  “Here,” said Selene, taking the cleaver away from her. “Why don’t you let me do this?”

  “Because I’m the cook, that’s why.”

  Selene gave her her best wry look. Clauda frowned and stuck her bleeding finger in her mouth.

  With infuriating ease, Selene carved off a slice of apple and paired it with the cheese. She held out the morsel. “How many times did you get hit with the mind lancet?” she asked.

  “Three, I think.” Clauda reached for the food and got it about halfway to her mouth before dropping it. “Crap.”

  “You’re lucky,” said Selene.

  “You don’t say,” said Clauda, pawing at the pieces of apple and cheese in her lap and only managing to turn them into smaller pieces of apple and cheese, now fuzzy from the blanket. She was hungry.

  “I mean it,” said Selene, carving another slice of apple and cheese. “Your eyes track. Your mind seems to be intact. You certainly aren’t having any difficulty speaking.”

  Clauda opened her mouth to comment and Selene, with a grin of triumph, shoved the food in.

  “Urgh!” Clauda protested, chewing angrily.

  Selene shrugged. “These tremors are the mildest of the possible effects of a mind-lancet attack, and don’t worry, they’re temporary. Unless . . .”

  Clauda swallowed. “Unless what?”

  Selene shrugged again. “Unless they’re not.”

  Glumly Clauda let Selene feed her the rest of the apple and about half of the remaining cheese. Finally she said, “You never answered my question. Why did you bring us all the way up here?”

  Selene sighed. “There’s a pass through the mountains ten miles from here. Once we cross it, we’ll be in Ilysies.”

  “Ilysies! Why would we go to Ilysies? Haly is down there!” She raised her hand and pointed outside the cave mouth. It shook and she quickly lowered it again.

  Selene glared at her. “We can’t go back for her and you know it. Our only hope is to convince my mother the queen to help us.” She waved a hand at Clauda. “You can’t even walk. Last night”—her voice grew higher in pitch, a near hysteria that frightened Clauda almost as much as the Eradicants did—“you were unconscious by the time your horse collapsed! I had to pry your arms from around its neck.” Selene looked down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. They gripped each other, their knuckles white. She released them and stood, pacing the small confines of the cave. “What was I supposed to do?” the lean, dark Libyrarian demanded. “I couldn’t go back then, with you like that. I didn’t know if . . . I couldn’t wake you up. Why did you have to come along anyway? Why did you have to poke into business that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with you?” Selene stared at her, her eyes accusing. “You shouldn’t even be here.”

  “Oh, so it’s my fault,” said Clauda bitterly, because really, it was. It would have been too late to do anything about Griome’s treachery if Clauda hadn’t put that note in Selene’s salad. It had seemed so exciting, at the time, to be part of an adventure.

  “No!” shouted Selene. “It’s my fault! You’re my responsibility. Haly is my responsibility.” She bent and snatched The Book of the Night from her saddlebag and waved it at Clauda. “I was so obsessed with this stupid book that I thought it was worth any risk to save it. Now look what’s happened! My clerk has been taken by the Eradicants, the Egg we found is destroyed, and this? This invaluable text that would save the world? It’s useless.” She threw it and it fluttered across the cave and landed in a corner.

  “Not useless,” said Clauda, and then, suddenly remembering an explosion last night as she fled, “Did you say you destroyed the Egg?”

  “Don’t you remember?” Selene’s eyebrows drew together. “What do you mean, not useless?”

  “Haly can understand it.” Clauda leaned forward. “You mean you really burned an Egg?”

  Selene’s jaw tightened. “I had no choice.”

  Clauda sat back again. “No choice? Cowshit. You did, too. Leave us there. I mean it’s an Egg, for Tale’s sake. You can’t just burn it, even to save someone. Think what that Egg could have meant to the rest of our people. They could use it to power the heating system—no more wood smoke and pneumonia. Or to light the stacks. Maybe even both. Nobody’s that important.”

  Selene gave her a look unlike any Clauda had seen from anyone before. “Remind me of that the next time I’m sitting in the dark listening to you scream.”

  Clauda pressed herself back against the wall, wishing that for once she’d kept her mouth shut. The food Selene had fed her sat hard in her stomach.

  Selene turned away and picked up The Book of the Night again. She opened it and stared at the pages for a while. With her back still turned, she said, “What did you mean that Haly can understand it?”

  Relieved at the change of topic and the opportunity to be right, Clauda said, “Maybe you heard some rumors, back home, about how she used to pretend that the books talked to her?”

  Selene gave her a tight nod.

  “She wasn’t pretending. It’s true. It’s always been true. That’s how she knew Griome was making a deal with the Eradicants. She heard it from his letter to his nephew.”

  Selene thought about that for a moment. “And how she knew how to open the vault. She said she learned it from a book. . . .”

  “Probably the maintenance manual that was sealed inside the vault at the time,” said Clauda. “And it’s how she can understand The Book of the Night even though it’s in a language nobody knows.”

  Selene’s shoulders drooped and she came and sat down across from Clauda. “Are you sure?”

  Clauda nodded. “She recited it to me. Just the introduction. Something about it being the words of the last Ancients. That’s what really got us in trouble—or Haly, anyway. They made her tell them about the books talking to her.” Clauda suddenly felt very much the kitchen scrub speaking to a Libyrarian, idiotically trying to keep her friend out of trouble, out of sheer reflex. “She had to, Mistress Selene. She didn’t want to.” She found that she could no longer take Selene’s steady, understanding gaze, and looked down at her twitching hands. “They think she’s a witch.”

  She heard Selene’s slow, deep sigh, whistling out like the last wind of the world.

  “Do you know what they do to witches?” Clauda blurted, looking up.

  Selene looked at her with utter stillness, no longer patient, but detached. “No.”

  “Well neither do I, but we know what they have done, what they might be doing now. . . .” Crap, she was babbling like a stripling. She might be a lowly pot girl, but she was in this situation. Haly was captured and there was no taking anything back. She couldn’t afford to be afraid. Haly couldn’t afford it. She straightened up and looked at Selene. “How do we get your mother to h
elp us?”

  Iscarion’s Folly

  Haly sat on the ground a little distance from the blasted remains of the vault, her hands tied behind her back. Her feet were tied, too, but just the same, Vinnais sat watching her, a rifle in his hands and his splinted leg stretched out before him. “It wouldn’t take much,” he’d told her after Ithaster had put the rifle in his hands, “just the littlest move, and I’d have all the excuse I need to shoot you dead. It’s my leg that’s broken, not my hand.”

  She believed him. Soth was dead, killed in the blast that Selene caused when she threw the Egg into the burning cart. Now Ithaster searched the wreckage of the vault for The Book of the Night. The knowledge that he would not find it was all that warmed her in the chilly dawn.

  Ithaster emerged from the shattered hatch of the vault, covered with dust and streaked with soot. He sat down heavily beside Vinnais and glowered at her. She had told him the book would not be there, but he hadn’t believed her.

  “No luck?” asked Vinnais.

  Ithaster spoke while still staring at Haly. “No. But it’s a shambles in there. Shelves have fallen over. The control station is completely obstructed. We’ll have to wait until Michander gets here to clear the wreckage, extract the Egg, and start burning the tomes. Quite likely it is as the witch says, and her cohorts got away with Iscarion’s tome, but we won’t know until every book has been checked.” Ithaster’s expression was grim. “Michander will be displeased with us.”

  Was this why they burned the books one by one at the Eradications, Haly wondered, instead of simply slaughtering the Libyrarians and setting the whole place on fire? Was there one book the Eradicants wished to spare from the flames?

  Vinnais nodded. “Just the same, I hope he arrives soon. If we have to go the day without water . . .”

  Haly swallowed. Already she was as parched as the dry land around them. She was hungry, too, and her left cheek was one big pulse of pain, steadily throbbing in time with her heart.

  Ithaster gave Vinnais a look of concern. “At least I can get you some shade.”

  Ithaster built a shelter out of struts from the wreckage of the vault and his and Vinnais’s robes—beneath them they wore leggings and close-fitting shirts knitted from nubbly, undyed yarn. After that he began removing books from the vault, making little piles of them on the ground. “It is far better to be feared than loved if you cannot be both”; “Little boys squash ants in fun, but the ants die in earnest”; “Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony.”

  When the day grew too hot, Ithaster stopped and sat with them in the meager shade. They were silent in mutual thirst and hunger. Haly constantly watched Ithaster, but he barely acknowledged her presence. It seemed he was too preoccupied with survival to bother torturing her again. She tried not to think about what would happen when the other Eradicants arrived.

  Heat and thirst overwhelmed her, and she dozed in spite of herself. She was awakened again by Ithaster singing in a bass voice pitched to carry, “Children of the Word, Singers of the Song, voices from afar chant praises to Yammon.” She opened her eyes and saw him standing on a nearby rock, waving his arms.

  Across the sun-struck plain came the reply, faint yet clearly audible, “Holy are the chords, sacred is the Song, weaving through the world the blessing of Yammon.” Haly could just make out tiny figures in the distance, wavering and winking in the shimmering air. One of them appeared to have a cone-shaped instrument through which he sang.

  Haly watched with mixed feelings as the Eradicants approached. They had two wagons, and they would have water and food, and she was horribly thirsty and hungry. But there was no guarantee they would give her any of what they had. And then, of course, there might be more “questioning”—more horrible pain—and she didn’t think she could bear that.

  She recognized Michander as the Eradicant who’d received Selene’s map from Griome. He had a long, high-bridged nose and close-set gray eyes that took in the smoking ruins of the cart and the twisted hatchway of the vault before turning their penetrating stare to Ithaster. “Subaltern Ithaster, what has happened here?” he demanded.

  As Ithaster drew breath, two other Eradicants left their wagons and came to stand beside Michander, listening intently.

  “Ithaster, Soth, Vinnais we, Singer subalterns of Michander three, traveled to small Ayor grave for thee, Iscarion’s Book of the Night to seek. Found we Libyrarian and servant these, come to enact Griome’s treachery. To steal the book and sneak away, but in the tomb we made them stay. The Libyrarian gave us Iscarion’s tome, and revealed herself a witch of—” Here Ithaster faltered and fell silent, obviously searching for an appropriate rhyme.

  “Come, come,” clucked Michander. “Quickly.”

  Ithaster nodded and resumed his chant. “The Libyrarian revealed herself a witch to be, when she knew the book with no need to read. It was Soth and Vinnais heard the passage . . .”

  As Ithaster sang his briefing, the two Eradicants accompanying Michander whispered his words to themselves, and when he had done, they turned away, each reciting the entire account over again from the beginning.

  They continued their recitation as they set about dealing with the immediate necessities of burying Soth and setting Vinnais’s leg. She thought she might take some satisfaction in his screams, but she didn’t. But then, he wasn’t Ithaster. Ithaster’s scream she was pretty sure she could have relished.

  They passed around water skins, and one of the Eradicants, a man of middle years called Hephaestus, knelt beside her and helped her to drink. Haly gulped frantically at the sweet water, afraid she wouldn’t get enough, but he held the skin for her until she’d had her fill. They had food, too, and Hephaestus fed her. All of which meant only that they wished to keep her alive, she warned herself, meeting Hephaestus’s impassive gaze.

  Michander declared that Groil, Basmuth, and Tirran would remain at the vault, burning the books and extracting the Egg, while the rest would return to the Corvariate Citadel. She assumed she was included in “the rest,” and she wondered what would happen to her after they got there, but she didn’t dare ask, or do anything else that might draw attention to herself. She tried to be very small, as if she could hide inside herself. So far the new batch of Eradicants seemed barely to have noticed her, but that could change.

  The cadences of Ithaster’s report continued as Hephaestus and Forvane put her in the back of one of the wagons, still with bound hands and feet. As the wagon pulled away Haly smelled smoke. She craned her neck around to see Basmuth feeding books to a fire one by one. If she concentrated, she could hear the book voices beneath the relentless drone of the Eradicant doggerel: “Simon was inside the mouth”; “I saw death rising from the earth”; “Never live in the village again.” The voices were but fragmentary whispers, soon swallowed by distance and fire.

  As they traveled north and west, the country became marginally more habitable, and in the middle of the second day, they reached a village, a small collection of rough stone huts huddling in the midst of dusty fields and goat pens. A girl who was breaking clods of dirt in one of the outlying fields spotted them. She turned toward the village and put her hands to each side of her mouth. “Singers!” she cried out in a high, carrying note, then tossed aside her mallet, hopped the stone wall, and ran alongside the wagon, grinning.

  Haly thought the people would flee, but no. Instead they came pouring out of houses and barns, shouting with joy. Some of them sang, too. Haly heard the word “Singers” spoken again and again, always in tones of happy awe. She also heard the word “witch,” with accompanying glares and fingers pointed her way.

  By the time they reached the village, there was a crowd of at least one hundred waiting for them. The dirtiest person Haly had ever seen pushed to the front of the crowd and took Michander by the hand, her mouth gaping in a wide grin. Haly, still tied in the back of the wagon, watched in stunned amazement as Michander allowed her to lead him through the throng and into what was surely one of the most impoveris
hed of the meager dwellings. As his back disappeared through the doorway, Haly looked to Ithaster and Vinnais, but they were busily engaged with a man who was worried about a sick cow.

  “Remember the song?” said Ithaster. “The one I taught you last time we passed this way?” He broke into his rich bass, “Mares get bloat and cows get bloat if too much pulse you feed them. Hay for a day or two, good as new.”

  “How are the windmills coming?” Hephaestus asked one middle-aged couple. The pair seemed marginally more well-fed than the rest of the villagers—the head man and woman, no doubt.

  “We’ve built five more since you were here last. But it’s hard to get the people to work on them. Song or no, they don’t believe that they’ll create holyfire.”

  Hephaestus nodded. “They’ll believe when their homes are aglow with light and warmth this winter. After the blessing, we’ll teach you how to build the generator.”

  Haly felt disbelief and outrage at the thought of peasants such as these with electricity while the venerated scholars of the Libyrinth shivered by their hearth fires.

  Her thoughts were interrupted when Michander reappeared in the doorway of the hovel with a baby in his arms. A loud cheer erupted from the crowd and women scrambled to spread a newly woven wool blanket on the ground in the center of the village clearing. Hephaestus stood beside Michander holding a case identical to the one Ithaster had in the vault—the one that held the knife she’d been cut with. Haly’s heart hammered and her cheek throbbed. But this was only an infant. What could it possibly have done wrong?

  The crowd drew back to give everyone a view as Michander knelt and placed the child facedown on the blanket. As he opened the case, Haly muttered, “No.” And then louder as panic rose up inside her: “No, no. Stop him!” Why was everyone just standing around watching?

  An angry villager leaped onto the cart, slapped her across the face, and plastered a hand firmly over Haly’s mouth. “Shut up, you crazy witch,” she said. “You’ll ruin the blessing!”