Chapter Ten

CHAPTER TEN

The Librarian

“People are earth and fire – just a little pinch of dust compared to this.”

AVERY

Provinces
Sandia
Aquamarine (March) 13, 2013

Anyone else who spent as much time as Relic reading books in the dark would have all but gone blind at half his age. Not The Librarian, however. It was one of the first things that had attracted Thean’s attention—his ability to spot even a flicker of movement in a lightless room.

But that was proving little use right now except to accentuate the deep tedium of night.

Isabelle had come down for a while and, good as his word, Cedwyn had taken the first shift. Relic parted ways with them after all too short a time, leaving them to their long talks while he sought the release of rest. It felt good to have a roof overhead.

Even the stars themselves could be tiring if there was no escape.

Occasionally, a few strains from Cedwyn’s ocarina would pierce the veil of silence, reminding him he was not quite asleep. When he shifted his long, lean body again, the music had stopped and the quiet it left behind grew lonesome. Isabelle’s laughter was gone.

In the murky shadows, Relic thought sure the Red Moon would rise.

But it did not – and soon enough, Cedwyn’s face pushed its way through the gloom, a single stripe of moonlight from a distant window outlining his chin and revealing his one green eye. He didn’t need to speak; Relic was up in a few seconds, dressed in a few more.

Cedwyn was still leaning against the doorframe at the top of the stairs ...

Perhaps stretching, perhaps already dozing.

Within moments, Relic was descending.

A solitary candle threw a long halo of light over the main table and outlined the shelves.

It was enough to light his way as he began to inspect the books again, a little thrill of private envy bubbling in his stomach as he imagined the person who’d arranged all these volumes just so. And not just that; but the feeling, cherished since youth, of being awake as others slept.

The world was easier in darkness. It helped people find it in themselves to care for each other.

And it was silent.

Silence. Relic’s fingers stopped roaming over the book spines as that thought pricked his consciousness and reminded him of something just out of reach from his dreams. He couldn’t recall, and found himself contemplating whether Cedwyn was asleep yet.

Asleep or just ... waiting.

The thought struck out of nowhere. He pressed his fist to his chin to keep from laughing.

When he composed himself, he began plucking volumes from the shelves and setting them aside next to the table where Cedwyn, it seemed, had forgotten his ocarina. The wood was smooth, the frosty color of a hunting beast. He simply worked around it.

Books began to pile: Realm of the Rising Sun, Voices of the Ancestors, The Diamond Path.

As he sat down with the books all around he asked himself, not for the first time, if he could have owned such a shop. Would he have been happy here, with the time and freedom to see these tomes as others didn’t – to fully devour each point, each turn of phrase?

In another life, maybe.

He had only sat a moment – enough for twenty pages or so – when a sudden noise startled him.

He was on his feet, crossbows ready, when he recognized it: Wind chimes. He had not even been aware of those chimes, but certainly they’d always been there, over the door. His gaze whipped to the candle, then to the window. The light was so faint it barely stirred the air gray.

With the shutters tightly drawn, there was no way anyone could see.

Anyone or anything, he found himself thinking as he sat down again.

He could no longer concentrate. He found his thoughts drifting to Jace.

The name made his legs itch; he wasn’t sure if he sat down and then bounced up again, or simply circled the table as he started to pace. He thought about what Cedwyn had said, playing the scene over in his mind. Thought of Isabelle’s words about the red envelope.

Thought, most of all, about their faces as he showed his knowledge from Thean's old logbook.

An occasion that was growing all the more frequent—

The Librarian made himself go outside and circled the shop – once, twice, three times. The first time was surveillance; the second, to detect any hint of change that might suggest he had been seen. The third, to do it all over without thinking. He ponderously counted his breaths.

There were too many, too many ... then barely any.

When he finished, his mind was poised on a pinpoint, taut in the dim space between thoughts.

It was a pattern devilishly hard to hold onto, something the monks once told him—

An idea lost in the depths of a child’s mind until something about Westwood brought it forth.

Westwood. It was a fraught word, something to test his resolve. He pushed his thoughts between his ribs and followed his lungs up and down even as he strode up the steps, opened the door, and returned to the table. Up and down until he could no longer remember.

“Body follows mind,” he told himself, and sat down to open one of the books.

The words were like runes of flame, coiled serpents awoken by the weight of his attention.

He tried to follow them, but they burned. His eyes resisted, too; he shut them at first, then tried to catch the words from the corner of his eye instead. He knew that if he could only make sense of them, it would change everything. He could prevent what was coming.

That thought transfixed him like only one other he’d ever had in his life.

This time, he recognized it for what it was. Eyes open, muscles slack, he breathed deeply.

Like water draining away, the thought left him aware only of its absence.

The darkness around him had shifted – it was brighter. More ... colorful.

Relic glanced at the book again, but when it gave him only the impression of words and not the words themselves, he realized with crystal clarity that he was asleep. It was not the first time since that night that he knew he could only be dreaming—

The others are going to kill me when they find out.

But that thought was like mercury spilling between his fingers.

Presently, something rapped on the door.

“I guess I haven’t been getting as much rest as I should,” he told himself. In this half-awareness, the emotions that would hollow him out were themselves hollow. He could not blame himself for being asleep any more than he could blame himself for being alive.

He glanced through the window as he moved, but not a single shadow was misplaced.

Four riders, behind the door, outbound, said one part of his mind.

In thrall to dream-logic, he opened the door. He was greeted by a creature as dark as an oil slick on the front step. Before his eyes could settle on it, it soared overhead. As he slammed the door, far too late to deter the entrant, it took up a sentinel’s stance on the mantel.

Quoth the raven: “Nevermore.”

Slowly and carefully, his eyes never leaving its form, Relic reached for the broom by the door.

He swung—

And it was gone. Behind him, now; its claws click-clacking on the tabletop.

Some three feet. Longer than an adult raven should be, his mind informed him.

“Of course it is,” he answered himself aloud. “I’m only surprised it’s not bigger.”

Relic rotated slowly on the balls of his feel, putting himself in position to try again.

The creature paid him no attention. In the faint candlelight, a muted rainbow ran across its wings as it fluffed its feathers. Its head was low, its talons digging idly and adding new scars to the wood. As Relic watched, it delicately craned its neck and turned the page with its beak.

There was no question: It was reading the book.

Relic slowly lowered the broom, his eyes widening as his breath seethed through his teeth.

“It’d be nice,” Relic said to the raven’s brooding form, “if things would make sense again.”

At length, the great bird tilted forward and flicked its head sideways to regard him.

“Nevermore,” it answered.

“Alright, then,” Relic said, another sigh still lurking in the back of his voice.

He crept forward—

Squawk!

Moving with deliberate nonchalance, Relic set the broom back down against a chair. The bird returned to its ruminations, burying itself beak-first in another open tome. As the Outrider rested heavily in that same chair, he wondered how he could be so tired when he knew he was asleep.

“Would you like some tea?” he asked. “Some spicy chai, perhaps? I can imagine some up.”

“Chai is just another word for tea, you know,” said the raven. “You’re referring to masala.”

Relic nodded slowly, his face selling slow revelation. It didn’t sound right to him, but he didn’t know enough about tea to question it. Aided by a half-flap of its massive wings, the corvid hopped closer. It indicated one book with the twitch of a talon.

“Is this Duchenne’s latest work? It’s codswallop.”

Relic gnawed thoughtfully on his lower lip. He felt like he was being judged.

That was nothing new, but this certainly was.

“I was hoping for some light reading so I could keep my attention on the door.”

Man and bird shared a knowing look.

“So much for that,” Relic admitted.

“It’s unseemly, how he glories in picturing whole worlds lost in the grip of tyranny.”

“It’s meant to be parody,” said Relic, tone brimming with correction. It shows how—”

“—the excesses of imperialism are self-sabotaging, yes. I know,” said the bird, punctuating its point with the drumming of that same razor-sharp talon. “That’s all well and good for now, but in one thousand years, he’ll look like the tyrants’ most ardent admirer. People will quote him.”

“It takes some context to cultivate an intelligent reading ...”

“Context that will be lost in sixty years. People won’t even know where the jokes are, Relican.”

Relican Avery found himself contemplating a future where all opinions held the same weight.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Relic told the bird.

“A bold statement of values that presupposes the truth is knowable and words signify meaning.”

Relic slowly closed and opened his eyes.

“No, I mean – you shouldn’t be here. Look at the size of you, at the size of the conspiracies of ravens we’ve seen in this town.” The bird tilted its head the other way, listening. “There’s more of you than there were people in Sandia, even at the height of the armistice. Why?”

Relic had lost the thing’s attention halfway. It eventually looked up from preening its chest.

“Maybe we came for the buffet.”

“There’s no sign of bodies anywhere. It seems like the people just ... just ...”

“Yes?” the raven prompted, fixing its beady gaze on him.

“Got up and left,” the Outrider finished lamely.

“We know they’re here, Relican – why don’t you?”

“I ... I don’t know.”

“Who is Jace Dabriel?”

Relic had a horrible thought – a thought of a great, all-consuming silence.

That was like a shiv of ice in his ribs; it drove him to the verge of panic in a way nothing else had for months. He sat back down in a rush and reached down to his cloak, fingers questing for the one item he never left behind. Not since that night.

The hunk of rotten, splintery wood he expected to find there had changed. Now, it was a pale figure: Marble or alabaster or rainbow moonstone, or something else that appeared in no logbook ever written. The little man in his palm had the knowing grin, the side-cocked head—

And, most importantly, the stupid hat.

Relican closed his hands over the thing in an almost prayerful gesture, feeling at once the cool of the stone begin to leak into his hands. And he knew, likewise, that it was not cold; that he would see the blush of life if he checked again.

He set the game piece down on the table and was not surprised to see it look around itself.

It took a tentative pace away, but went no further. Rubbing his hands together now was like pushing a thin sheen of oil between his palms, and in the way it stuck and clung to every groove in his skin he could sense things: Insights he had overlooked, events he had not witnessed.

When he gazed down at his hands, his palms glowed—

And when he closed his eyes, he could still see them clearly. Even track them in motion.

He waved them back and forth before his eyes – back and forth. That was kind of funny.

“See how the wood, given the proper catalyst, is transmuted into a completely new form?”

With those words, the raven fluttered into the air and settled somewhere behind Relic. The Outrider dared not look, for now its shadow was vast. Its voice rose from a point between his eyes, an inch deep in the skull. He gazed steadily down at the Jace-figure, unmoving.

“So, this is why I’ve carried this piece of junk all this way,” Relic said to himself.

“Materials, as well as individuals, have marvelous properties – but only if they are exposed to the right forces at the right time. But without some purpose, some plan, it means no more than water freezing and melting again. Composition, cineration, calcination, sublimation ...”

“—and still no nearer the prima material,” Relic added seamlessly. It was a phrase he had decoded in Thean’s logbook, one he strongly suspected was not meant to be found; at least not by anyone the constable didn’t have in mind at the time of its writing. And yet, there it had been.

At a certain time, beneath a certain light, in a certain reflection—

And if that wasn’t enough, it had been written in some archaic dialect of Winterwine.

The discovery had seemed like a triumph at the time. And yet ...

“That’s all well and good, but it still means nothing to you,” the raven pointed out.

“Then why don’t you tell me?” asked Relic.

“It would do you a grave disservice to tell you anything you don’t already know.”

Relic looked up into the vast shadow and frowned, seeking meaning in its shifting outline.

“That presumes you know what I don’t,” he said, “and aren’t just a figment of my imagination.”

“So it does,” said the raven. “But then: All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

A quip died in Relic’s throat as his mind leapt forward into the fray. He was talking to himself, he decided; that, he could accept. If the phantom would not answer any direct questions, perhaps it would volunteer something else. A bird’s eye view.

“The enemy has been here. Is still here, maybe.”

“To assume the contrary would be to assume they retreated or never existed.”

“Both absurd ideas,” Relic said with a nod. “But I can’t get at the alternative.”

“You must be aware of the danger the others are blind to.”

Chin on his fist, Relic looked as if he had not heard at all.

He continued:

“A host the size of the one that was waiting to attack Fairlawn can’t just disappear into thin air. But, nowhere we’ve been in the Provinces shows the first sign of occupation. A horde like that would leave evidence for miles. It would have to steal food, supplies. It would ...”

“Rape, murder, and pillage?” the raven asked.

“Most certainly,” Relic said grimly. “Even the provinces would be calling for aid.”

“Nothing you’ve said is wrong,” the bird told him evenly. “And I think Foucault would agree.”

“They had to have fallen back in this direction. The people are gone. Yet, where is – anyone?”

“What gives the stones their power?”

Relic’s head snapped up suddenly.

“What?” He let himself look at the shadow for a moment before adding, “I don’t know. The only source on that is the logbook, and – it’s bad enough already. Just handling that book, just studying what we already know ... it already has everyone on edge.”

“Have you ever heard the tale of Kamab the Insatiable?”

Relic’s eyes narrowed on the shadows before him.

“Not yet,” he said. Then he thought again: “No, I must have. When?”

Relic suddenly became aware that there was another sound in the room, one of which he had been almost unaware before. He caught a flash of gold from the corner of his eye; resisted the urge to turn, and then tracked it in the darkness; the gossamer flitter of a honeybee’s wings.

It flickered like fire in the dwindling light. He imagined it pollinating great embers in the land.

There are no bees in the desert, Relic thought. If only he could grab that thought—

But he knew he was wrong. The golden bee had every right to be there: Not only in the desert, but anywhere else it chose to roam. Had it not been the bee who told him this story? He thought he had left it behind, feared it might sting him, but it never had any such intention.

The bee settled on one of the apples, in the shadow of the raven—

And ignored the haughty bird entirely.

The story began.

***

The greatest kingdom to ever rise stood in Magonda, a trackless sand as vast as a great sea.

The sages of the high desert held one truth above all, that woman was water, and man, fire.

Thus, a man could sear and wither a woman; a woman could drown and smother a man.

Where men fought, green places turned to ash. Where women gathered, there was life.

Gold, the flesh of the holy Sun, was as common in that age as grains of sand are now.

Kamab, first-born of the high priest, was chosen by the Moon to rule.

But the high priest denied the signs – he said the Sun demanded fealty.

Kamab held to the ways of the Sun as the high priest commanded.

Scorched dry by the Sun’s gaze, Kamab drank dry the Great River.

Yet still held to the Sun’s ways, proud and constant.

A never-ending thirst lay heavy upon Kamab.

When at last it was time to take on the crown,

that Thirst had not in any way abated.

The high priest celebrated and gave thanks, but he was the only one.

For soon the Second River, and the Third, and Fourth

followed in the Great River’s fate.

Their tracks wend like white scars from one battleground to another.

And the Golden Road grew a thousand leagues further

but in the end, there was no river to sustain it.

The world around Relic reassembled itself slowly. The shadow standing out upon the wall had become a twisting aether, a stage where a thousand fantastic shapes danced and bled into one another. When the last word was spoken, the darkness was encompassed in a single outline.

The raven.

It asked again: “What gives the stones their power? Think carefully before you answer.”

And Relic did – he sat and thought, hearing the story again twice over. Then he spoke.

“It’s the fact ...” He paused to order the words. “They don’t change. Wood burns, earth can crumble or harden, water flows or freezes, fire consumes or gets snuffed out ... but these stones are fixed points, endings that take eons to reach. They can’t be shaped except by other stones.”

“And what of people?”

“People are earth and fire – just a little pinch of dust compared to this.”

“Is that why you always show mercy, even to the ones you’re sure are your enemies?”

The Outrider did not answer.

“That’s not something Thean taught you.”

“It’s not something he’s exactly pleased about, either,” Relic answered wryly.

“It’s because you understand it at your root. Wood must rot, flames must gutter. Heed these words, Relic: If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”

Relic stood again, looking this way and that. The candle that had been beside him on the table had transformed into a lightless lantern with nothing inside to illuminate it. The bee, which would have cast its own light, was nowhere to be found.

In the corner of his eye, he saw the Jace-figure—

Standing ready to fire its tiny crossbow at an unknown threat.

But now, he could see it all: The man, the stone, and the wood, each just a degree apart.

Relic closed his palms over the thing and held it that way until he felt it grow cold, then rough.

“I won’t remember this time, either,” he said, rising his chin to address the shadow on the wall.

“When the time comes, you will,” the creature said. “You’ll just have to learn to trust yourself.”

Relic lowered his face to hide a manic, put-upon grin.

“That’s easy for you to say.”

He felt his body drawn up, as if on strings—

Waking up.

Relic took a breath. The air was pregnant with forlorn footprints in wet soil.

He heard a scrabbling in the void of night outside, just an instant before—

He jerked awake, moving so fast that the chair rocketed out from beneath him and went skittering backwards across the floor. The sound was so loud he was sure it would wake all the Outriders – all of them – and bring them running.

A full minute went by as Relic righted the chair and held it steady.

He simply held it there, remaining motionless—

As if any inattention would send it running off into the night.

When he felt sure of himself again, he went outside. Jumped down the stairs and crossed the street. That’s where he was standing when he looked up at the sky, trying to remember how the stars had looked in his youth and whether he could get the time right.

Something dark distorted the stars in a way Relic saw, but couldn’t have described.

A moment later, he was ready for it – and he saw the raven, its body distended. For the first time, it occurred to him that the birds weren’t coming in from the desert: They were going back out to the desert. That could only mean—

A blackened scrap in the thing’s maw confirmed his hunch.

Feeding time was over.

Relic jogged to the corner and peered down the street in the direction the scavengers had come from. Some quick figuring on his fingers fanned the flames of his suspicion. He returned to the bookshop and cast about in search of a map of the town.

It was right where he would have put it himself.

Relic studied into the night and didn’t stop until dawn’s first strokes made the sky a vivid fresco.

“Cedwyn,” he said to the air, “we need to talk.”

For once, alas, Cedwyn Knight was not right there where he was needed.

Taking a sheaf of notes under his arm, Relic hurried into the morning.

Chapter Eleven  (E) Bryce Valley #2190503 by Dan Hiestand