by Stephen Hunt
‘Well,’ said the woman. ‘I know you’re not new apprentices sent here to study with us.’
‘Too old?’ said Jacob.
‘Wrong gender,’ said the woman. ‘I’m Iaroia, master of the hold here. Or mistress, if you prefer. You’re not guild travellers. The grand duke only allows women to work inside the library… one of his many sweet little foibles.’
Jacob hoped they wouldn’t be staying in the city-state long enough to experience too many of them.
‘Perhaps the grand duke appreciates that tomes of beauty should be looked after by creatures of similar allure,’ said Sariel, making a theatrical bow.
‘The locals do not sully themselves with books,’ said Iaroia, in a tone of contempt that made it clear what she felt about such arrangements. ‘God forbid that they learn something. Most of the librarians working here came in via the airfield as foreign postings. And your flattery would work better after a bath. Which one of you carries the guild seal?’
Jacob took it out and passed it to the woman. He introduced himself and each of the others in turn, as formality required, but didn’t delve into details of the nature of their travels. She eyed the seal suspiciously, turning it over to examine both sides. ‘This is from a library in the north of the Lanca… the league? You are a long way from home.’
‘And we’ll be travelling a ways yet before we call it done,’ said Jacob. He glanced around the chamber. ‘Are we welcome to salt and roof? Rooms and hospitality?’
‘Welcome is stretching it,’ said Iaroia. ‘You’ll be tolerated. Borne a little better when I know what you and your little travelling circus act is doing crossing the plains with calls on guild hospitality. Not that we don’t have the room. We’re a lot larger than the provincial hold that gave you this seal. Perhaps seventy times more archive space here.’ She stared at the gask. ‘Can you speak the trade tongue?’
‘I certainly hope so,’ said Khow.
‘Well, you’re better groomed than your friends, at least, even with the spikes coming out of your hide.’ She pointed down a corridor off the reading room. ‘Guest rooms are on this level. You won’t be allowed access to the rest of the library.’ She jangled a large circle of silver keys on her belt. ‘Not without these. There’s a refectory next door to the bunk chamber. I’ll be along with food and water in an hour. There are toilets by the refectory. No visitor baths here, though. You’ll need to use the public ones tomorrow.’
Sheplar watched the guild master walk off; clapping her hands to indicate her juniors should follow after her. ‘Do we need a bath?’
Jacob shrugged. ‘She’s a woman, isn’t she? To her, we always need a bath.’
As good as her word, Iaroia returned with two librarians and platters of food after the party stowed their packs under the simple dormitory’s bunks. Together, they went to the chamber next door. The librarians put the food and water on the table, while Jacob and his companions sat down. The simplicity of the refectory might have been modelled on one of the monasteries perched on the hinterland of Rodal. The fare that appeared before them was of similarly humble origins, a fact not missed by Sariel as he sniffed at the jugs of water, and poked the gruel-like meal with his fork. ‘This is a dry centre of learning, Lady Iaroia?’
‘Holdmaster, if you wish to be formal, my scraggly house-guest. Alcohol, confined spaces and flammable paper are not a recipe for the successful preservation of knowledge, Mister Sariel.’ Iaroia sat herself at the end of the bench facing the band of visitors across the table.
Sariel rubbed the surface of his long leather coat. ‘Ah, the dust of travel. I must apologise, dear lady. Normally I would appear before you as a prince, not a rank shard-borne voyager.’
‘A prince of the hedgerows, perhaps?’ she said, using the tongue-in-cheek term for vagrants.
Khow consumed the gruel at the long table without complaint. ‘We should also apologise for keeping you up after your usual opening hours.’
‘Oh, these are well within our hours of work. The radiomen’s guild in Hangel is only five minutes’ walk from the library and they work after darkness here. The next nearest receiving station is very far away. During daylight hours, the sun interferes with their radio’s signal strength. They have to operate at night when the heavens are clearer… so we receive updates for the archives at hours few other libraries would tolerate. Another “perk” of being posted here.’
‘You are not Hangel-born?’ asked Sheplar.
‘I was born in a country to the south of here, far beyond the plains. Denka. Very civilised, very comfortable. At least compared to life perched on this cast-off rock.’
‘No locals working here?’ said Jacob.
‘A couple only. When you have gad servants to run after you, an austere life of service in the cause of knowledge and learning has very little appeal.’
‘I don’t see servants,’ said Jacob. ‘I see slaves.’
She shrugged. ‘They don’t use that term for the gads. But then, the grand duke’s main source of revenue is fuel fees from aircraft that must refuel when crossing the plains. Inflammatory labels such as slave might put off some of our more civilised visitors. I strongly suggest you don’t talk in that manner within earshot of the duke’s soldiers.’
‘The hell with them.’
Iaroia shook her head at Jacob’s temper. ‘The Grand Duke Pavlorda Bragin is a mad son from a far-from-sane family line. His paranoia has only grown worse with age. There is a plains people prophecy that during the Age of the Seventh Sun, the House of Bragin’s rule will come to an end by the hand of the grand duke’s own son. According to the local calendar, that’s this decade. The gads are awaiting the auguries… the appearance of the trickster angel Jok and the spirit of Ogan, the twice-born. They grow restless and the Hangels have become even more repressive and brutal in dealing with their workforce.’
‘How many children does this noble have?’
‘As far as his wives are concerned, Pavlorda is without issue. But he is unable to keep his hands off the palace serving girls, and many gads have borne him half-breed children. The bastards are killed, of course.’
Jacob’s hands tightened on the mug of water he was drinking from. ‘He murders his own kin?’
‘Not only his own,’ said Iaroia. ‘What is sauce for the ruler must be sauce for his people. Any half-breed born within the city limits is drowned by his soldiers or abandoned on the plains to feed the first hyena to come across the unfortunate babe. Rumour has it that many years ago, one of the grand duke’s half-breed children was smuggled out of the city by his mother after she gave birth in secret, and the boy was taken in by a gad tribe. That child is known as Chike Bragin and he has grown up to be a war leader who is currently giving the city a great deal more trouble than it is used to.’
‘The merchant clan we flew in with are bringing rifles and ammunition for the grand duke’s forces,’ said Jacob.
‘More weapons,’ she sighed. ‘Just what is needed to improve the situation. Even if every man and woman in Hangel were to carry a rifle and a bandoleer full of bullets, the plains outside go on forever, and there are a great many more gads outside the walls than there are people sheltering behind them.’
‘At least the gads have the power of prophecy on their side,’ said Jacob. ‘Against a seven-round rifle.’
‘Do not mock,’ said Sariel. ‘There is power in words.’
Jacob shrugged. ‘Words are your trade.’
‘And what is yours?’ asked Iaroia, looking intently at him.
‘I am – a pastor.’
‘You don’t sound so sure of that.’
Maybe I’m not, at that. ‘Think of us as four pilgrims.’
‘Well, pilgrim, as far as words are concerned, there’s truth in Mister Sariel’s. Chike was raised on the plains by a diviner, a great diviner. Have you heard of them?’
‘Some kind of shaman, a grassland wizard?’
‘They practise magic, that is true. Herbal medicine and simple
science for the most part. But they can scry the future. The grand duke keeps his own stable of diviners in the palace, shamans he has captured from the tribes during fighting. The diviners are chained so they can’t commit suicide. And he blinds them, as that is said to increase their power of augury.’
‘A barbaric practice,’ said Khow. He raised his little metal calculator. ‘They must be powerful indeed, if they can follow the branches of the great fractal tree using only the power of their mind.’
‘Barbaric practices? Very much so,’ agreed the librarian. ‘It was the great diviner that declared Chike to be the child spoken of by the Prophecy of the Seven Suns, after Chike found an old spear-bow in a cave as a boy.’
‘I’m not familiar with the weapon,’ said Jacob.
‘A war spear as tall as a gad with a crossbow and winding mechanism built into the wood,’ said Iaroia. ‘All adults carry them on the plains.’
‘A royal bastard raised by a wizard, a boy fated to claim the kingdom,’ murmured Sariel, in wonder. ‘This is an ancient story with many roots.’
‘Ancient it may be,’ said Iaroia, ‘but the story’s lost none of its potency for the grand duke. He’s been driven insane trying to kill Chike and his followers, trying to prevent the prophecy coming true. And the harder the grand duke squeezes, the worse the situation becomes. An irony, don’t you think? The tribes around the city have laid aside their blood feuds and differences and united behind Chike. That is something unique. I may not be a diviner, but I can tell the future of Hangel, and it will not be a happy one, whichever side wins.’
‘I do not think we should linger here,’ said Khow.
‘On that we’re agreed,’ said Jacob. ‘Where do the city’s ticket brokers operate from?’
‘There is a hotel called the Salyut on the market square; any air passage broker worth dealing with can be found inside or on the streets alongside. Seeing as you carry the guild’s seal with you, I won’t even charge for telling you that.’
‘I need to borrow your map room, too,’ said Jacob. ‘Preferably also without charge. What funds we have, we need to conserve.’
‘Just four pilgrims in search of a distant investment opportunity?’
‘Something like that,’ said Jacob. ‘Although I think our ultimate business’ll be paying some people back.’
‘There are too many traders in the world operating in that market,’ said Iaroia. She stood up to lead them down the corridor, unlocking a series of doors and taking them into a warm stone chamber filled with large wooden map tables. The surfaces were empty, but her librarians turned up with a large-scale geographical key, and consulting with Khow, Jacob worked out the chain of maps they needed to examine.
Khow leant over the key thoughtfully. ‘Here. This is where Kerge has been for the last month. He has not moved.’
Jacob tracked the most direct route from their current position in the middle of the plains and began writing out the numbers of the tube rolls that would need to be brought out of archive, filling a sheet of paper with pencil-scrawled reference codes.
‘You gentlemen of the road really are far-called,’ noted Iaroia, reading the list before passing it to one of her librarians.
‘The distance is of no concern,’ said Jacob. ‘It’s a journey we need to make.’
‘Well, you’re going to keep some cobblers in business between here and there.’
It took two hand carts clattering into view, each filled with map tubes, for the surfaces of every table in the chamber to be covered. Perhaps fifty counters in all. The maps were ancient, dust-spattered things that looked as if they hadn’t seen the room’s electric lights for centuries. Jacob and Sheplar used spools built into the tables to trace red journey threads above the nations drafted on the thick paper, thousands of states with every type of geography… from seas to marshes to deserts to forests to mountain ranges. Sheplar looked despondent as he examined the distance they needed to cross. Sariel was more thoughtful, running his finger across the charts as though he was dipping into the soil of each land.
‘You are sure about this?’ Jacob asked Khow.
‘I am certain, manling.’
‘If we could harness a strong trade wind and fly with no refuelling,’ said Sheplar, ‘following this thread would mean seventeen years in the sky. Realistically, with layovers, perhaps twenty years’ journey time with merchant carriers. How can the skels have travelled so far, so fast? They should not have this level of lead on us.’
Iaroia stood by the last table they had papered with map sheets, examining their destination. ‘You are certainly travelling by a strange compass. Not to mention a dangerous one.’
Jacob walked over, looking down at the land on the map. ‘Is your atlas accurate, to scale? The country on this last map covers too much territory?’
‘Accurate when it was drawn, and if anything, an underestimation. This isn’t a country, it’s an imperium. Vandia. The richest, most powerful state I have on record at the hold, and then some.’ She waved at her staff to fetch the gazetteer volumes for the country. ‘They are said to have mines in the imperium, working mines overflowing with metals and ores.’ She reached out and patted the leather money purse attached to Jacob’s belt. ‘The copper in your coins most likely came from Vandia, passed down the caravan routes millennia ago. The gold in the grand duke’s treasury was probably pulled from the ground there. The steel in the rifles you brought in extracted there centuries ago.’
‘Do they keep slaves?’ asked Jacob.
‘Jacob Carnehan,’ laughed Iaroia, ‘if what I recall from our gazetteer is even half-correct, every nation within a hundred thousand miles of the imperium acts as their serf. You wish to safely build a tower over four-storeys tall, you need steel. You need that… then you must deal with the imperium and their agents on whatever terms they dictate. You require lead for your bullets and metal for your sabres, you must offer regiments to fight for their cause. What Hangel has here and your society back in the Lanca possesses in the way of factories and mills and technology, these are but the distant, ancient wash of that wealth and power. Metals transported for centuries, each league travelled making the ore rarer and more expensive. Do the Vandians keep slaves? Why wouldn’t they? I imagine they are very much like the grand duke here, except with the riches of the very gods to satisfy their demented whims.’
‘I understand something of the nature of ores,’ said Khow, raising his little metal calculator. ‘They do not all originate from a single source. My people have chemical tests that prove that.’
‘My needle-skinned guest, you are indeed learned. Yes, there are working mines elsewhere on Pellas. Too distant to be shown on the maps I possess here. I’m not sure if your lifespan is similar to those of us of the common pattern, but if you could fly far and long enough, you would one day reach a librarian’s guild hold with an alternative source of metals in its maps. But for us, Vandia is the closest source. The mother lode, you might say.’
‘Surely, the Vandians are a benevolent people,’ said Khow. ‘If they possess such wealth, they could dedicate their lives to learning and progress… they could send their charity to distant parts of the world?’
‘Ha,’ snorted Iaroia. ‘Have a look around the royal city tomorrow and then walk around the common city below. You will see gads sweating in the fields and in the workshops, encouraged by the lash and the cane. If you stumble across a group of Hangel philosophers sitting around the streets engaged in rarefied discourse and teasing out insights into the secrets of the universe, do let me know. I’d love to meet them. One thing I know about the Vandians is that they are normal men and women. That tells me all that I need to know about their imperium, without even consulting the archives.’
‘Do you know if the Vandians have fast aircraft?’ said Jacob.
‘I don’t need our gazetteer for that. I saw something once, when I was a girl in Denka. I was in my aunt’s gardens when the clouds parted and an object came flashing past, like an arrow,
although with its size and the altitude it seemed to be flying at, it was probably closer to the size of a four-hundred rotor carrier. It was made of metal, and there was fire roaring behind it. It sounded like the gates of hell had broken open and the howls of the whole underworld were echoing across the land. It crossed the whole width of the sky in a couple of seconds. That, I was told by my aunt, is how the people of the far south travel.’