The Witch of Glenaster

by Jonathan Mills

  The square was one of the largest in Ampar, and four great pillars marked its corners: one for each of the Four Great Emperors, founders of the civilized world. Each was subtly yet recognisably different, the carven marble telling the story of each man’s various triumphs and victories, and how they had forged the Great Settlement, which established peace and stability after the chaos and violence of the Long Wars. That was how the Histories had it, anyway.

  We alighted near the Compendium’s high entrance-doors, the driver hungry for coins, and Thomas added a generous tip to the fare.

  “We already paid!” protested Magnus, sulking, as the cab drove off.

  “There’s the good little capitalist!” laughed the swordsman. “It’s a custom. Besides, I doubt he bathes in ewes’ milk.” This was an old expression - though I had not heard it in a while - and it was always said in a tone of quiet resignation; for so few in the wide world were rich, and so many were poor.

  Thomas strode ahead of us, pointing with a long, thin finger to the highest levels of the city, framed beyond, like a rumour in the morning haze.

  “There is the Citadel, away up there,” he said. “There lies the Imperial Palace, with its high Keep, and no man gets in who has no business there. They say there is an elite troop of shadowfighters – the emperor’s personal guard – who protect the grounds of the Palace by night and day.” He said this with a note of contempt, and I wondered what he meant, and who the shadowfighters were.

  “But what about the ordinary folk?” I asked. “Isn’t it terribly expensive, maintaining such an army?”

  Thomas gave me a sideways glance, and smiled.

  “I believe,” he said, slowly, “people have got into trouble for asking such questions too loudly…” And he grinned his tombstone grin, and walked through one of the open doors, into the atrium of the Imperial Compendium.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I remember thinking, as we left the warm glare of the morning behind us, and entered the cool, high atrium of “the greatest library in the world” (as it called itself), that you could fit a small town into that one, empty space. The rest of the Compendium was vast, of course, but then it had to be, containing as it did the world’s accumulated knowledge; but it seemed beyond reason and sense to make what was after all only a lobby, an entrance-hall, as stupidly big as this. Words twittered up to the high ceiling before they had had time to reach the listener’s ear, and the walls of grey marble, which someone must once have thought impressive, merely looked dirty. The effect was crudely emphasized by the only piece of real furniture: a conical desk, designed to appear as if balanced on its narrowest end, behind which sat a large, crop-haired man in an ill-fitting uniform, whose head was barely visible above the cone’s upper rim. Thus both he and any visitor were dwarfed by their surroundings: it seemed the better part of a hundred yards from door to desk, and by the time you arrived there you felt like falling to your knees, which presumably was the intention.

  Around the walls hung greying tapestries, which depicted various events in the empire’s long history, and were interspersed with closely printed text explaining their significance. Somehow they managed to make even the most exciting stories seem deathly dull, and I dreaded having to spend several hours here, with nothing to do but follow the herd of people progressing in a slow arc around the atrium, pretending to be fascinated by the exhibits when they were presumably just killing time, like us.

  The guard behind the desk looked at us as we approached. Peering over the edge, he asked, unhappily:

  “Yes…?”

  “Greetings, brother,” said Thomas, cheerfully. “We were just wondering which way one is supposed to view the exhibits – that is, where does the exhibition start exactly…? My two young friends here are eager to fill their minds with some really nutritional knowledge, and I wouldn’t want them to miss anything.”

  I gave Thomas a look, and he half-winked at me. The guard, who was slow but not so stupid that he didn’t know when he was being patronized, scowled slightly, and grabbed a leaflet in his fat, dirty fingers, pushing it across the desk at Thomas, who bowed, and retreated. We padded after him, and I asked:

  “You mean we really have to spend our time here, looking at tapestries, while you go off and have adventures?” He sighed.

  “Firstly, I am not off ‘having adventures’; secondly, you did say you wanted to see the Imperial Compendium…”

  “Yes, but…”

  “I will be two hours at the most. Look after your brother, and don’t get into any trouble.” And with that he strode back to the entrance, and disappeared through the doors, leaving Magnus and I with a crumpled leaflet, and a room full of strangers, and boredom.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  For a good half an hour we trooped around the exhibition, obediently following the route marked out on the leaflet for the most part, though Magnus quickly grew impatient, and started pulling at my hand, scratching various parts of his body, and staring at the other visitors with unselfconscious curiosity, and I suppose a little fear: for the confident and stylish, and somewhat haughty, citizens of Ampar were a mystery and a puzzle to us, their faces – especially when out on the street – seemingly always full of bad-tempered obliviousness, as if time itself might arrest their feet if they did anything so obvious as stop to pass the time of day.

  Inside the atrium, they were more hushed, and less hurried, but still an air of impatience clung to them like knotweed, and though the exhibits were dull for my brother and I, and hardly set at a height – or in a tone – designed to engage anyone much under the age of forty, I felt disappointment that the adults around us did not show more interest. So much for the elite, I thought, much later, when the memories of my childhood had settled in my mind, and I could give them meaning.

  My eye started to wander, and I grew weary of the exhibition, and weary of constantly having to keep Magnus amused. I noticed that there were people, who I took to be librarians of some kind (though not the fearsome Magi-Librarians of my imagination), coming in and out of the atrium through a door set in one of the far corners. A guard was stood by it, though he did not seem particularly watchful, and occasionally folk would stop and engage him in conversation before disappearing into whatever lay beyond. As we moved closer – the crowd of which we were a part moving with aching slowness around the hall – I took in more details of the door, and also began to note the frequency of its opening and closing: and how long it took to do so, for it seemed, and I registered this with growing excitement, to be on a steady, and slow, hinge…

  Its handle was a vertical bar of solid brass, riveted firmly to the door and set outwards from it, to afford a good grip; and both its outside and, so it looked, its inside, were padded out with soft leather. It appeared quite heavy, for some of the smaller folk who passed through it had to entreat the guard to help hold it open.

  Approaching the part of the exhibition nearest the door, I found myself daydreaming, then planning, and finally deciding, to attempt to slip through it when the guard wasn’t looking, and so gain access to the rooms beyond, and hopefully the Compendium itself. I knew this was a stupid and dangerous thing to do, and yet somehow I could not help myself, and I felt that this was the only way I would find the answers that I sought, and steel myself for my encounter with the Witch.

  I reckoned two or three seconds was the maximum time one might have, judging by the average extent of the door’s outward angle as it was opened; two or three seconds to get through, and one would have to be very, very close before attempting it. I mulled whether to include Magnus in my deliberations, but decided it would make it more, not less, difficult, if I were to suddenly grab and then pull him after me, and I could not leave him alone in the atrium. I gave him as much forewarning as I dared, whispering:

  “That door…”

  And that was all he needed to know my mind. But, just as his small face rose in surprise and his mouth opened to protest, the moment was upon us, and we had to act: the
door opened. It opened wide, for a portly and slow-moving man came through it, accompanied by a small and daintily built young woman, whom the man ungallantly allowed to hold the door open as he waddled through it. He was apparently someone of importance, for the guard was quite solicitous, helping the man towards a group of enrobed dignitaries, who had the air and manner of people who had quite forgotten what it was to be anything other than fawned upon.

  This was our chance: for one of the young woman’s shoes slipped off her feet, and as she stopped to push it back on, she balanced herself against the door, and held it out almost to its fullest extent. And as she let it go, not noticing us - for her life had other miseries - we dashed through the door and into the darkness beyond, I gripping Magnus’s hand so hard he had no choice but to run after me.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  We blinked like cats as the door closed behind us, for the corridor behind it was very gloomy, and only the dimmest light seemed to burn. I knew we could not tarry there, for clearly there was a good degree of traffic in and out of the atrium this way, and we would be seen. So we picked our way through the shadows, and tiptoed softly round a corner, and then another, till the walls and thick ruby carpets seemed like a tongue, feeding us ever backward into the greater space behind.

  Along the sides of the corridors were heads of bronze, some cheerful, many more grotesque, so that Magnus became frightened, and insisted we return and wait for Thomas. But my desire to see the Compendium, to see the place wherein all of the world’s knowledge was housed, was something like a mania by now, and I would not be stopped.

  I pulled Magnus along, till he complained that I was hurting him, and I sought to soothe him with kind words.

  “I only wish to have a look,” I told him. “Just a look…”

  But his eyes burned brightly at me in the half-light, and I saw in them the fierceness of his resentment.

  We crept on, till we came to a small hallway, wider and somewhat lighter, but still hushed and forbidding; and, as we stood deciding which way to go, to the left or to the right, a trickle of voices coming nearer from one side made the decision for us: we turned left.

  I was hurrying now, half-skipping, convinced the knowledge I desired must be near, and that we would soon emerge into the Compendium proper, and its high shelves of lore, stretching along halls of bright timber and broad stone. Instead, we rounded a corner and walked almost headlong into a guard, sat behind a small table, and chewing a dirty fingernail while he read a book so small it nearly disappeared behind his fat-fingered hands.

  In appearance he resembled the guard in the atrium, and I wondered if they might be related, but more than this I felt a fool for having so stupidly blundered into him. As my mind fumbled for an excuse, the guard looked up, gave a tight little yawn, wiped his mouth, and called over his shoulder:

  “Chay-TERRR!!”

  For a few moments, there was no response. Then, with a far-off squeak, a small split appeared in the wall behind the guard’s desk, and a door emerged, as if out of nowhere; and from behind it came a stooped, bespectacled man with thinning hair and smooth-looking jowls, and a smirk which might have been friendly in intent, but only managed to look sinister.

  The guard blinked slowly at us, and turned to the other man.

  “Ah: Chayter. Good. Got some visitors for the library. Show them round, will you, there’s a good chap. I’m very busy here, seeing to, err… seeing to… things. Chop, chop.”

  The man called Chayter nodded, then addressed us in a wheedling little voice:

  “Ah, yes! Follow me. The library is this way…”

  My brother and I hesitated for a moment, but then came the realization – they thought we were meant to be there! – and I recovered myself enough to smile at the guard, who had returned to his book, as we followed Chayter, shuffling with small but rapid steps back through the secret door, which then closed as if by its own will behind us, for I saw no handle, nor hinge.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  “Bit of a short cut, this,” said Chayter, pulling a lamp from the wall, and, waving it theatrically before him, disappearing down a narrow passageway that wound lazily onward to the right. I felt Magnus’s distress in the pressure his hand made on my palm, and I tried to reassure him. The passage started to slope downward, so that our feet fell away from us, and we half-walked, half-ran behind Chayter, who seemed to maintain the same strange pace regardless. Finally we came to a door cut into the stone, similar to the one we had entered by, though this one had a handle, and, with a swift pull, our guide yanked it open. Behind it was a small staircase, lit, like the passage, only by the feeblest of lamps, which flickered lazily in the grey air. We picked our way downward with care, Magnus reaching tentatively for my back as he walked behind me, not wanting to seem scared.

  At the bottom of the staircase was another corridor, but this one was more cheerful; and at the further end there seemed a great pillow of light – natural light – creeping into the dark corners and recesses of the walls, and urging us onward towards it. As we approached, we saw we were at the bottom of a light-well that reached, it seemed, right up to the roof of the building.

  “We are now directly beneath the Imperial Compendium,” said Chayter, “as it was built by the Emperor Justin in the Time of Consecration, of which even the oldest ghosts have no memory. It is a long way to the library. We will have to take a carriage.”

  And as he said this, he pulled open a wide set of doors to our left, and Magnus and I were quite startled by what we saw.

  A small cart, riveted together from great slabs of iron, sat unmoving in a dark hollow, crouching like an animal on a bed made of steel rails, that ran together in parallel lines, upon a series of wooden beams. Beneath these was a floor of gravel, and, when I looked further, I saw that the hollow was in fact a tunnel, opening off into the darkness; and that the bed on which the cart sat followed it, threading in a more or less straight line away into the distance. Neither Magnus nor I had ever seen such a thing, though I supposed it must be some form of transportation. I presumed that Chayter would harness a horse to it, as a means of getting quickly to our destination; though I could not see where horses might be stabled down here.

  Instead, he opened a door in the side, and invited us to join him within, where we found two benches, thinly upholstered, one in front of the other; and as he sat upon the first, we climbed on to the one behind, which seemed the right thing to do, and he closed the door.

  Magnus and I watched, fascinated, as he fiddled with levers and wound handles, muttering to himself all the while; and I must confess I was undecided as to whether now might not be a good time to give him the slip, and continue our journey alone; but then the carriage, as he called it, started ever so slowly to move.

  I could not see exactly how this was achieved, except for the brief glimpses I had of Chayter’s hand on a small wheel, or of his foot working some kind of pump in the floor of the vehicle. But I did not worry overmuch about the means by which we travelled; I was more concerned by what might lie at the other end, and this tempered my glad relief at the cool breeze on my face, and the sweeping clack of the carriage against the rails.

  I suppose it was a full ten minutes or so that we travelled through the darkness of the tunnel, and indeed at one point it grew almost pitch, despite the occasional pools of light that fell from shafts in the ceiling above. I was pleased to see the light increase as we started to slow, the friction of the wheels on the track below making a kind of burning smell, like bread left too long in the oven. By the time we cornered the final bend, we were hardly above walking pace, and the carriage rolled sedately into a high, narrow room, panelled in oak and ceramic tiling, on which was engraved countless small facsimiles of the Emperor Justin’s coat of arms. We came to a halt about halfway along a wide platform, which abutted the tracks, and was set a little above them, so that one could alight from the carriage without having to step down; nevertheless, Chayter kindly helped us by opening the door, and
guiding us gently on to solid ground. As I turned, I noticed the rails went on ahead, returning again to the darkness.

  “Yes,” said Chayter, noticing my look. “They go on for a good couple of miles yet.”

  He shuffled quickly towards one of three arched exits, leading away from the carriage platform, chatting as he went.

  “This was the underground railway, used by the emperors and their retinue. It ran all the way to the Imperial Palace once. They could avoid being seen by the hoi polloi…” He chuckled. “Of course you know all this, being the children of a lord. I must say, you look rather different to the way His Grace described you when he asked that I show you around. But my eyesight is not what it was, and the light is not always terribly good down here. Now, follow me: this way…”

  I stopped to gaze upward at the vaulted ceiling, high above, the light leaking down from hidden fissures upon my face; and there was a cool moisture in the air, and a scent of damp stone and fresh water, that I breathed in gratefully. But when I looked down, Magnus was at my side, as he always was, and he had an accusing look in his eye.

  We trotted behind Chayter through the wide tunnels into which we now emerged, occasionally climbing a stair, or looping along a broad corner, and I realized we were heading upward again, and the floors were becoming smoother, and the walls more decorative. Murals of dead kings, and the vast landscaped gardens in which they had walked, filled every available space, as we made our approach to a small lobby - whitewashed at its tips, and meanly furnished with richly embroidered chairs that clearly no bottom had graced for many years, if ever - which itself was the anteroom to a large and empty hall, its double-staircase fanning outward to the floor, and its wooden balconies looking down on us from their high vantage.