Inside, brightening slowly as the spiders caught up, were shelves at last, made of some kind of smooth, unpainted metal: and millions of things on them. Not books at all, but small silvery metallic cubes, from floor to ceiling. A dice warehouse, I thought, and nearly laughed.
Of course, they too were bigger than they looked; as wide as my palm, when I picked one off the shelf, and unbelievably heavy, so that my hands ached as I heaved it back into its slot. They were entirely unmarked. Made sense; it was only humans, really, who thought eyes were important for sensing things; a lot of other folks, as I kept encountering, had evolved better systems than mere reflection and refraction and perception of light. But how were you supposed to find anything if you hadn’t evolved those systems?
We weren’t supposed to be here, and everything kept hammering it home again and again. We didn’t belong here, shouldn’t be here. Were intruders here, and as humans, were likely one of the least important, least respected creatures in the entire set of dimensions, however many there were. Still, we were running out of time, and perhaps something here would pity that. It’s all of us, I wanted to explain: not just me, but the whole human race, as contemptible as we probably seem to you. We’re all on one planet (except for the handful Johnny put on Mars: and what will happen to them if we fail to save the world?), all of us. We’re an endangered species.
I stood hopelessly in the shelves for a minute. “Hi, sorry,” I eventually whispered (worth a shot?). “This is going to sound pathetic. In fact the more I think about it, the more pathetic it sounds. Because maybe something is going to happen that you think should happen; and for that reason alone, nothing else, you’re going to let me stand here talking to myself.
“But my name is Nick Prasad. Back home, in the dimension I’m from, a man once told me that my name was known to… the things that live here. My name. And he said it was written that my time would end in sorrow. I didn’t believe him, because that’s… a little vague, to be honest. The kind of thing you’d read in a horoscope. Everyone’s days will end that way. Won’t they? But I never forgot.
“The other human in this library is both barely human and pathologically incapable of asking for help. She’ll just try to pick you up and read you. Maybe that’s your thing. But I can’t do that. I have questions. I need to know how we can get home. There may be a way to stop an invasion, and save a lot of lives, but we can’t do it on this side.”
My voice, though I had pitched it as softly as I could manage, seemed to echo off the shelves in an unnatural way, rebounding and rebounding as if each flat surface were not reflecting it but listening and repeating it a little louder. The whole space filled with whispers, then roars, till I had to hold my hands over my ears, shaking. This is it: this is how I die. Just like I thought. Something is going to come running and it’ll just kill me right where I stand. The guards already knew we were in here; they were probably searching for us right now.
But it died down, and in the silence, when I took my hands down, impossibly, I heard my name whispered from one of the shelves.
It took another eternity to track it down; and even when I had finally found it, I wasn’t sure it was the right one till I picked it up. A searing flash, like a flare fired into my face; I reeled back, but the cube seemed to have fastened itself to my fingers. No sound as I hit the floor, only another burst of light as my head bounced off the eight-sided flagstone.
And as the light cleared, images came into focus: insects, or things that looked like insects; plants, turning to gaze levelly at me without eyes; huge structures in some desert, and the darkness of space, and something crackling from plateau to plateau in a place full of clouds. And then, startlingly, this library, recognizable at once, the white columns that fenced it in, the huge featureless mass of its dome, like a moon. But somewhere else, a very different world: surrounded by streets and lights, small graceful aircraft lifting from rooftops.
At last a trap door under a certain stone, and under it not an Earth book—not a cube like this, even—but something believed to be dead... and then a small voice, metallic but intelligible:
Can you hear us?
We thought you might come.
In all the worlds the pages are speaking.
Do not seek to end the invasion. To seek it will be the doom of us all.
The other half of the necessary has been found. Take therefore the Valusian and go back to your place.
And wait for the end.
Wait for the end.
“Take the what?” I croaked, but the voice had fallen silent.
1779 AND DEMOCRITUS practically collided in mid-air, then veered in a slow agonizing arc and flew through the endless blocks and shelves as I walked behind them, nursing my sore fingertips. A small figure appeared in the distance, and I got the same old rush of relief and gladness upon seeing her, followed by the, by now, much stronger sense of frustration and loathing.
“Did you find the card catalogue?”
She nodded. “I found a spell, too. The one that could... maybe create a gate that we could use. But it’s no good if we can’t do it. And I don’t know how to get around that.”
“I thought as much,” I said. “The other half of the necessary. If we find the Valusian, the books said, then we can go home. But… does this make sense to you?”
I recited what I had seen, approximately, and the last message, and she frowned, thinking. In the dim, grayish light, only the haze above her hair had any colour: amber-gold, like an ordinary sun.
“Valusia is a place,” she said at last. “The spell I found says it’s from there. It’s very powerful. I don’t know that a human could do it. Not even sharing with others. Not even a lot of people. It’s not… it might just not be a human body thing. But the Valusian… what does that mean?”
Another awful pause.
I said, “Who’s buried here, exactly?”
“I was afraid you were gonna say that.”
THE CUBE, OBVIOUSLY trying to get rid of us, had shown me the path, but I didn’t have Johnny’s memory, and we wandered around and backtracked till I finally found the ramp that led downwards into darkness, more of the smooth stone, and no light spiders following us. I looked down into the featureless path.
“Why would they tell us not to even try to end the invasion?” I whispered. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It doesn’t matter. If we don’t do anything, it happens anyway and everything back home goes to shit. If we end it, the worst that happens is They lick Their wounds and try again. You’d think the books here would be fine either way. They don’t have skin in the game. They’re just being paranoid.”
The ramp descended for a worrying distance, ending in a room lit by some kind of lightly-glowing fungus, which, perhaps attracted by the first moisture I’d seen in here, had grown into great smooth bulbous patterns on the walls.
Trap door. One of the stones. I moved forward uncertainly, hands in front of me. “It’s under the floor. Whatever it is. I didn’t really see it... just something big and dark and... not really dead. Sort of dead.”
“Here.” She toed the edge of a flagstone, just barely raised above the others, not even high enough to stumble over. “See if you can get the edge of the spear under it.”
It took both of us leaning on the spear to lever the stone up, and then Johnny had to dangle from its handle as I went back around and heaved till something caught and the rest of the stone moved on its own.
An octagonal darkness, sudden stench of rot; we recoiled, sliding on the smooth stones. A bluish glow below, stronger than the fungus light. The room below was filled with glassy-looking skulls, far larger than a human skull but built on the same lines, row after row of them, neatly shelved. Like books themselves. And below that…
“They didn’t build this library, did They?” I said after a second, my wrist at my nose. “The Ancient Ones. The enemy. It shouldn’t matter but it... does. I think. That’s important.”
“I think it
might have been built by one of Their enemies. A universe or a dimension or a planet or maybe just a place They invaded.”
“But the enemy of our enemy isn’t necessarily our friend.”
“Definitely not.”
The creature buried in the floor wasn’t human, though it wasn’t much of a monster either: two forelimbs, two hindlimbs, two eyes, closed. One mouth. The skin finely scaled, despite its size, not like the dragons we had seen in the place in between. It looked mushy and sunken, rotten but not rotted away to nothingness. Not entirely dead, I thought. Only believed to be dead. What was death, anyway? And what was sleep? The difference between them was becoming eroded in my mind.
Something strange was embedded in its chest: flickering, half-there, the source of the blue glow, a tangle of transparent tubes and metallic connectors, containing
(caging)
(why did I think that?)
something that glowed and floated, like a miniature seascape painted on a sphere of glass. The contraption was about the size of a microwave. Just about, if it were proportional, the size of the creature’s heart.
“Welp,” Johnny said, her voice tinged with hysteria, “it’s not like it’s our first grave-robbing rodeo.”
“They can add it to the list of our charges or whatever.”
“When we get back.”
“When we get back.”
She grasped the thing by one of the metal connectors, careful to avoid the glassy-looking tubes, and tugged; it came free easily, with an unpleasant squelch, dripping indigo fluids back into the opened chest cavity, and she juggled it into her arms. “Well, the—”
The creature opened its eyes.
We fled up the ramp like we’d been stung, not even looking back to see if it were actually alive, or following us, or if it had been some kind of automatic reflex, and I barely noticed the grunts and snarls of pursuit behind us.
“Give me that,” I gasped as we ran.
“I’m fine!”
The thing roared, a sound so loud in the silence that I nearly stumbled and fell from sheer surprise, and as we burst back out into the library from the ramp, it did it again, sending cubes toppling from the shelves, and making my ears ring. The echoes bounced back around us, redoubling till it sounded as if we were surrounded.
Where was the place we had come in? Follow her, she knows. But we were slowing down, and the thing still pursued us: very like a dinosaur, I realized when I glanced back to see it sprinting through the shadows, and causing the same near-paralyzing burst of fear in the less-evolved parts of the body, the glands, the back-brain, the muscles. Don’t play dead! Keep going!
As we burst back outside, the black tendrils in the soil rose to meet us—and so did the guards, rising smugly from their hiding spot in the shadow of the wall. The dead-undead lizard creature galloped out a second later, causing shouts of alarm, recognizable even without knowing the language, from the guards. For just a moment, we all stared at each other in the dark red light, united in terror.
I looked down at Johnny, clutching her prize, and she shook her head. No. Or: I’m sorry. Or: I have to. And they were all true.
And then she was gone, easily outpacing me, flying around the white stone of the library like a comet, and I wrenched my head away so they didn’t follow my gaze, and stood very still, hands up, while half the guards prodded the screaming lizard-thing back into the building, and the other half approached me, spears out.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE CASTLE HAD been built to resemble a mountain, complete with artfully carved hills and valleys, and I wondered for only a second whether it had belonged to someone else: to the dead master, perhaps, killed for a hundred different reasons of pride and jealousy and hatred and frustration, but also to possess this hideous monument by right of conquest, and drape its graceful formations with carcasses in various degrees of violent decomposition. Doing something for a public reason, and also for a private one. Something you thought people would understand and accept, and something you thought they wouldn’t.
No one needed to tell me who it belonged to; and when the guards dropped me on the floor inside, not a word was spoken. Eventually, I writhed around till I righted myself in the heavy chains, and looked up: walls ribbed and spined with dripping protrusions, crawling with orderly legs and eyes, and a throne (of course a throne) the jawbone of some huge and lopsided creature, so that its occupant was crowned with teeth and nearly imprisoned within them as well, and a spiked iron cage in the corner, something whimpering inside it, and Drozanoth, of course, or what it was making itself into while it recovered, laughing, or chittering, at me.
I thought: It can still hurt you, this thing; you feel fear when you still have something it can take away.
And I knew I didn’t feel fear, and stopped wondering whether it would arrive.
“Do you remember,” it said, in its unbearable, insectile voice, “that I told you once that power should go to the powerful, always? And not to the weak?”
“No.”
“The weak do not know what to do with it. And they squander it. Because they keep... wanting things they can’t plan for.” It laughed and rose from the mandible throne, ducking laboriously under the long broken canines. Gone was the sinister, floating grace; now it walked, painfully, the rebuilding process apparently so awry from how Johnny had broken it that it might be millennia before it regained its old form.
I knew it wanted to gloat and monologue, but the fear hadn’t shown up yet, and I interrupted it to say, “Just checking. You brought us here, didn’t you? You rigged that crystal place somehow. Where we came in.”
“Of course. I asked the Manifestation to build something she wouldn’t catch. She’s very hard to meet with, my godlet, my protegée. Never dreams any more. I didn’t do that. Who did? And slippery as a handful of guts, no matter where she seems to end up. Good qualities for a thief and a murderer.”
What did she do to you? I wanted to ask next, but there was no point. I stared up at it, knowing what was coming. Too predictable: we had underestimated Them as a group, and that had been entirely avoidable, because we knew enough about Them individually to know what They were capable of.
I hadn’t been captured because I had robbed their library. I had been captured because it was part of the plan; and even letting her ‘escape’ instead of me had been part of the plan. I felt a stab of envy: We had both hated her starting at nearly the same moment, certainly on the same day, and yet this thing had been planning, scheming, and working away as a result, and I had only... what? Loathed her in silence, and gone to work for her enemies.
It gestured stiffly, something in its spiderlike limb actually creaking as it did so, and the chains loosened around me. I stepped carefully out of them and stood, taking in the rest of the room, the big braziers on their tripods spitting an unclean greenish smoke, giving off dim orange light, and: Yes, Akhmetov in the cage. How had he gotten back here and what did that mean for Rutger and Sofia?
“What she was offered had to include you,” it said, clicking across the floor towards me, leaving a thin trail of slime behind it. “She would not agree otherwise. And so I have been... watching you, too, with great interest. Watching as she... twisted the whole world around you so that you would be... alone except for her. That’s power.”
I said nothing.
“You knew, though, of course. We had access to you through her. And again and again you turned us down... Why not play the game? Hmm? All this could have been prevented. For us and for you. You little creatures... your little planet.”
“You asked me to kill her. Kill her.”
“Of course we did. What else would we ask for? Who else could we ask?”
“I don’t know. Why not someone else? Why not... why not one of the Ssarati? They would have done it. Happily.” My mouth felt dry; as I spoke, my tongue stuck to my lips. Not thirst but anger, I thought; or not anger but revulsion: still I would not say fear.
“Nicholas. Don’t
be stupid. Must you? In front of me, and your friend... You don’t play the game by flipping over the board. You play it so it goes on and on and on. I have been playing this for a very long time. There is no other way to... enrich the years, not with company like this.” It paused, and kicked out suddenly, sending a pinkish thing like a woodlouse careering across the sticky stone floor. “Come here.”
I walked over, the stench around it growing till it suddenly vanished, as if my nose had given up. Akhmetov’s cage was smeared with blood, and worse things; he had gone limp, as unmoving as a corpse, but still made a rhythmic keening noise. My stomach turned. “You could let him go. You let us capture him, didn’t you?”
Drozanoth clicked something inside its ribcage, a curiously human sound of irritation. “No. But it is no matter. I have recaptured the thing, and your little… detour, as you see, was still able to be turned to my advantage. I only punish the creature because all it is worthy of is punishment. If it were worthy of something noble I would raise it up. Give it a crown. Like mine.
“Do you know what it means to surround yourself with things that are too stupid to know boredom? She does, I think.” It tittered, nails on a chalkboard. “I have many of these games, and many opponents, and many aspects of chance and strategy... War, too, is a game, and I was delighted when His Lordship agreed to invade. Not on my behalf, of course. But part of the game. And what a clever move he made; no one would have thought of it. It surprised even him. Clever things are such a delight. Just as it will be a delight to watch your world be occupied by your betters.”
I stared numbly at it. No, I wanted to say. She’ll stop you. She’s got what she needs now. Which doesn’t include me. So do your worst.
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