Valka’s nails bit into my arm the instant we crossed the threshold, heavy doors swinging shut on temple-hushed quiet.
“You’ve finally done it,” she whispered, strangely breathless. “You’ve finally brought me somewhere nice.”
Dust hung thick on the air with the smell of centuries, danced in sunbeams cast through high and narrow windows on a quiet undisturbed in nigh as long. Delicate mosaics showing geometric designs tiled the floor, and richly carved counters ahead and to either side of the double doors stood tall, their attendants stooped over ledgers behind iron grillwork fashioned in the image of thorned vines. The doors themselves stood shut beneath an arch carved with an inscription.
“ ’Tis Classical English, yes?” Valka asked. “What does it say?”
I squinted up at the old, squarish letters. “Great is Truth,” I read aloud, “and mighty above all things.”
“Can we . . . just go in?” she asked me, looking round as if for some sentinel or sign.
One of the attendants raised her head from her book and said, “You may. But kindly keep quiet.”
Keep Quiet, I thought, capitalizing the word. Bowing my head, I advanced and held the door open for Valka, standing to one side so that I caught the look on her face as she passed me and beheld the Library itself for the first time. Sharp though my memory may be, I do not share Valka’s perfect clarity of recall. Things fade for me, dim, and distort. Memories are lost.
Though not the memory of her face.
Her eyes glowed as they widened, but her smile and look of wonder stretched wider still, until the joy in her and the awe yawned large enough to swallow the Imperial Library and drink its every word. I could not help but smile. After decades, after nigh on a century of waking years and more than a century asleep, after years of patient waiting and delay and time spent poring over Imperial military reports and scans from captured Cielcin ships—Valka’s faith had been rewarded.
She moved forward in a kind of dream, left me hanging on the door. I watched her go, filtering in behind her, not daring to speak and interrupt her religious moment. Stacks of books surrounded her, aisle upon aisle of circular shelves marching, bending away to encircle the massive library. Ladders ran on brass tracks in the tile alongside inlaid strips of carpet to deaden the tramp of feet. Valka spun as she advanced, taking in the sights, obvious tourism earning her a dismissive glare from a novice clearly not yet trained in the management of her outward emotions.
“There must be a million books on this floor alone!” said Valka, sotto voce. She almost laughed. She turned to the nearest aisle—marked in brass on its end cap with a sign reading Encyclopdias, Extraterranic Biologies, Na-Ne. Selecting a tome at random, she drew out one volume of a 20-volume set detailing the native pseudoflora of some planet I had never heard of. She turned the pages, flipping through so quickly I knew she could not possibly be reading the text. I had to remind myself that she did not have to. Merely seeing the pages was enough. Valka could recall each idly-glanced-at page with the clarity of digital recall.
She closed the book with a thump.
“Simply marvelous!” she exclaimed, a manic gleam alight in her eyes. “And these are just encyclopedias, dictionaries, compendiums . . . oh! And indexes, look!” She was grinning like a fiend as she turned the huge slim index volume around to show me. “Attention: This index is imperfect,” she said, displaying a card inside the front cover, written in both Classical English and Galstani. “Hadrian, they don’t even know where all their books are!”
“How could they?” I said. “Students must move them all the time. And I’ll bet each time the curators try to reorganize things some new curators come along with new ideas and change everything over.”
Valka was shaking her head. “You anaryoch. A collection like this should be properly sorted, backed up, scanned. What if this place burned? What would happen to all this?”
“They’ll never have a machine in here,” I said. “The scholiasts in particular are forbidden. It was scholiasts—well, scholars—that built the machines in the first place. Your people have forgotten what the Mericanii were like. What they did.”
“ ’Twas so long ago!” Valka objected, hugging the index to herself. “So much has changed!”
“You remember Brethren,” I said softly, confident that here in all the universe there were no cameras listening in.
Her face fell, and she placed the volume back on its shelf. “Maybe you’re right,” she said.
But Valka was not one to let my being right ruin her time in the Library. She brushed past me and returned to the central aisle, marching along its spine toward the central desks and the main stair. The archives rose above us for several levels, each railed with old iron, and connected by a spiraling iron stair. Scholiasts in viridian sat on straight-backed chairs at tables or wall-in reading desks, keeping rapt silence or else softly murmuring to one another.
Following Valka’s lead, we climbed the stairs and ran along the narrow span that led from the central spiral to the second floor of the archives. We continued in this vein for hours—for the entirety of the afternoon, in fact. We climbed to floor after floor, and after a dozen or so floors passed through the roof of the lobby to where the iron stair became stone and the round aisles became straight. Here Valka stopped her climb and we descended instead by a sweeping outer stair that spiraled about the outside of the central archives, passing wall-niches where stood the busts of great thinkers, magi, and poets long dead. Switchback stairs broke off from ours at regular intervals, ascending and descending straight up and down as may be.
After a while I realized what Valka was doing: she was building a map. When we each arrive in a new place, we must inhabit it for a time before it becomes real, before its passages and turnings become to us as familiar as the lines inside our hands. Valka needed but one showing to become accustomed. I marked how her eyes—still wide with wonder—marked each brass placard and aisle marker, knowing that with each idle glance she etched an indelible memory of what each aisle held and where it was. In watching her, I conceded that she, too, was right. With Valka’s memory alone, the Library might be properly indexed in a palatine lifetime.
On the third level or the second we exited the stair, passing out into an annex attached to the archives’ drum tower. There we found washrooms alongside a dispensary offering cool water and the scholiasts’ only true vice: coffee. Here we lingered a moment, sitting in a corner among quietly chattering students, and talked of little things.
Exploring the annex further, we passed beneath an arch with its brass signed marked SCRIPTORIA. Here a curving hallway tiled black and white processed beneath arched vaults with arched doors to either side. Through these—some open, some closed, some occupied—stood small chambers with writing desks and papers, vellum, and inks alongside charcoal and rubber and jars of sand, all the tools of the scribe’s trade. Names on movable type showed in sliders on the doors, marking each cell for its occupant: Tor Hunt, Tor Saad, Tor Vermeule, and so on. At one of these we stopped.
Number 113.
Here I pause, for it is in this very chamber I sit at my work, writing this very page. And turning to look at the wooden door, I look back across centuries at my younger self, standing beside Valka in the door. How young I was! How young and how untested. We stepped into the room, my room, and looked round. The cell was and is not large, just more than four yards deep and three across, with a canted writing desk beneath the veined glass window with its view of the towers of the athenaeum compound and the sea beyond. If I crane my neck I can see a sea mount looming on the horizon, brushing the limb of the gas giant Atlas where it skirts the heavens above. As in the hall without, the ceiling was vaulted, and as in the outer stair of the tower, there stood niches filled with the porphyry busts of sages. The traditional bust of Imore was there. The first scholiast stared impassive from his niche above a cubby where the room’s occupant m
ight theoretically leave his or her manuscript. I ran a gloved finger over the ledge, scraped a thick caul of dust from the dark wood.
“Gibson,” Valka said, voice strangely hushed by some quirk of the air.
“What?” I looked over my shoulder, found Valka pointing at the dark bust of a man above the central niche in the left side. Moving to join her, I squinted up at the statue in its enclosure. It was not my Gibson, not at all. The image was of a handsome man with the strong jaw and cheekbones of some patrician line. Sharp nose, high forehead, eyebrows steeply slanted. He was no scholiast, if the wry smile he wore was any indication. I read the inscription. “Christopher-Marcus Gibson,” I said. “Golden Age ethical philosopher. Fairly obscure.”
“How do you know this?”
“It’s who my Gibson named himself after,” I said. “When the scholiasts are embraced by the Order—when they become scholiasts, that is—they take a new name as a sign that they’ve cast aside their old lives and the attachments of family and so on, which is important. Especially because most of them are palatine.” I gestured at Gibson’s bust. “Gibson—my Gibson—always said he was the finest philosopher of the late Golden Age.”
She cocked her head to one side. “Looks a bit like you.”
“Maybe a little.”
“The jaw,” she said, pointing. Valka frowned. “Why did he take his name?”
“He never told me,” I said, turning from that first Gibson’s statue to look at Valka more fully. “I don’t know much about him.”
“About your Gibson or this?”
“Either, I suppose,” I said. Christopher-Marcus Gibson was of an age remote almost as Alexander, as the last pharaohs and the first Caesars. The Golden Age of Earth, before mankind was made subject to her machines. Who could say with certainty what sort of man was he, who might have broken bread with Churchill or locked horns with Bonaparte? Who might his friends have been? Heroes and prophets of that antediluvian time? Not even Kharn Sagara would know, for Sagara—immortal and eldest as he was of all the Children of Earth—was a child of our latter days, a child of the Exodus, of the Peregrinations that carried mankind from Earth. None now live who can answer these questions.
My own Gibson was as much a mystery.
The scholiasts burn their dead and scatter the ashes to the winds. They keep no records, no biographies. They are servants, stewards. The only memory they leave behind is the work they did in life.
So it is with the rest of us, in truth.
“You know, I don’t even know his name?” I said. “My Gibson, that is. Who he was before, you know? He was palatine, so he was someone.” I felt her glaring at me and raised my gloved hand in apology. “You know what I mean.”
Valka wrapped an arm around me and stood there in companionate silence, looking up at the elder Gibson’s likeness. “Does it matter who he was?” she asked.
I looked down at her, astonished to hear her ask such a question. As long as I had known her, Valka had obsessed about identity. I suppose I did as well, if differently. Where I had concerned myself with the proprieties of antique class, Valka’s prejudices had run against the Imperium as a whole.
Against me and everything that I was.
As a young man, Valka’s pretenses at egalitarianism had irritated me, not because her compassion for creatures like the Umandh on Emesh and the Irchtani—even our own homunculi—was misplaced; it wasn’t. But because her compassion ended there and excluded me. Excluded Gibson, too. But Gibson was dead, and whoever he was, I knew that I would never see him again.
“No, I guess it doesn’t,” I said. “We should head back. Varro’s bound to be back soon with the prince.”
Valka nodded and permitted me to chivvy her toward the door.
I lingered for but a moment on the threshold and—though I did not then know it—looked back upon the very chair and desk at which I now spend my exile. Turning round, I can look even now upon that elder Gibson’s bust. His statue is why I chose to return to this scriptorium of the three hundred that line this hall. Sitting in its shadow, I feel almost as if the eyes of my Gibson were on me.
I left the cell then, not knowing I would ever return.
CHAPTER 54
UNLOOKED-FOR
“THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL SAID SHE can’t allow thousands of soldiers loose in her city,” Varro said from across the bare stone room the scholiasts had set aside for Valka and myself.
Seated on the edge of one of two narrow cots, I looked up at the scholiast, checking the frown that wanted purchase of my face. “Understandable, I suppose,” I said. Aea was a small city, and the addition of several thousand fighting men—however well trained and civilized, as I liked to imagine mine were—would not be good for the locals. Drunk and disorderly conduct, fights, theft . . . all the collateral damage of men swaggering and high on their status as Imperial soldiers. And more than Imperial soldiers. They were members of the Halfmortal’s own Red Company. I was certain the last thing the locals wanted was several hundred star-born bastards kicking about without fathers. “But she did make provision for us?”
“The Sevrast Islands,” Varro replied. “They’re an archipelago to the north, just on the far side of the equator. There are a few towns there, fishing settlements—but the greater part of the islands is still wilderness. The governor-general proposed our men might take to the beaches. It’s warm this time of year.”
I caught myself nodding along. “Camping trip, is it?”
“It’s an insult,” Alexander interjected. The young prince stood in the arched window looking out over the quadrangle two stories below and the novices strolling beneath the ancient ash tree at its center. “A Prince of the Imperium and a Royal Victorian Knight relegated to a literal backwater.” He turned, looking for all the world just like his father for a moment. “Of course this whole place is a backwater.”
I raised my gloved hand. “It will be fine,” I said tersely. “You’ll find there’s more to the world than cities, Alexander. You’ll like it.”
“The beaches?” He sounded incredulous. “I don’t like sand.”
“Enough,” I said, not lowering the hand, but turning it palm up in a gesture of peace. Directing my attentions to Varro, I asked, “How soon will we have men on the ground?”
“Corvo is having them decanted now,” my scholiast answered me. “But it might be three days before the first group is fit to make planetfall.”
That made sense. The rapid thaw and reorientation we put soldiers through in emergencies was less than medically optimal. Now that we had the time and the opportunity for respite, it was better to take things slowly, to run medical exams on all our troops—human and Irchtani alike. “I’m not sure how long it will be before Tor Arrian gets his paperwork all right and proper so Valka and I may begin, and Earth knows how long we’ll be at our research,” I said, speaking past Varro and Alexander, addressing the room at large as my father might have done. “It could be years, so I’ll want to make sure everyone has a good long time on the ground. But I don’t want everyone down at once ruining the place, and I don’t want trouble with the locals. Let the officers know they’ll be on duty so long as their men are on the ground. Their time will come at the end.”
The scholiast bowed. “I will send a man to the day gate to wave the Tamerlane.”
“Very good,” I said, and waving a hand dismissed the scholiast from my presence.
“Where’s the doctor?” Alexander asked. The prince had returned to studying the world beyond my low window.
Smiling, I lay back along the end of the bed, resting my tired muscles. Pallino and I had spent the morning sparring, and my body ached with memory of it. The patrician treatments had made the man stronger than he’d ever been, and Pallino had the wiry strength of a legionnaire, even when he’d been an old man. Young again, he was a terror, though without any of Crim’s finesse or my polish. “Where
do you think?” I asked, watching the prince with one eye, hands behind my head.
“Still reading?” He sounded shocked.
“She doesn’t read,” I said, rolling my ankles as slowly as I was able, relaxing taut cords. “She’s scanning.” Alexander knew full well that Valka was Tavrosi, and he had some inkling of her abilities, but I saw one hand form itself into the familiar warding gesture all the same: first and last fingers extended, the others curled. “She found the xenology section last night. She’s been turning over every leaf as fast as she can.” Knowing it would frighten my young squire, I said, “She’ll have absorbed half the books in the section by now.”
The truth was, I envied Valka her abilities. As I have grown older, I have found it increasingly difficult to sit down and read, preferring to listen to my terminal read to me as I go about other business or sit drawing with my charcoals and my folio. It took me hours to absorb what took Valka instants.
Bowing his head and—for a change—not arguing, the prince answered, “I suppose it has its uses.”
Never one to simply agree out of hand, I grunted and said, “Plato objected to writing, you know. Said it would spoil man’s ability to remember. He was right. Imore worked for decades rebuilding mankind’s lost capacity for memory. Valka can absorb an enormous amount of information without learning it.”
“But she can recall any line or bit of information from it,” Alexander said.
“Yes,” I agreed, “but she hasn’t developed any kind of theory about her new knowledge. She can’t sort it. Or hasn’t sorted it.”
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