by Sara Wolf
And then we see it.
The island is far bigger up close, and the cliffs far taller than I originally thought. But beneath one cliff, there’s a gap. A gap between the ocean and the land, the cliff sticking out and hanging over, leaving a perfect height for the Lady Terrible to slide under. The sailors and I watch in awe as the helmsman takes us into the gap, the masts almost skimming the rock, flirting with the danger of snapping in two. Every heave of the ocean below us feels twice as dire now, and some of the sailors clasp their hands and start praying to the New God. Others watch overboard as the water turns from choppy blue to an incredibly clear turquoise color, milky hordes of shrimp and kelp-babies floating on the surface. Essentially, it’s a cave with a sea for a floor. And we sail along it, carefully and quietly, every single one of us is on edge that something will scrape against something and capsize us for good.
But the reef formations under the water are surprisingly scarce, and the deeper we go, the darker it gets, until there’s nothing but black. The only light comes from the water, refracted turquoise and up to us by the sun. I look over to Lucien, his proud face illuminated from beneath by the eerie light as he stares silently into the nothingness.
“What’s wrong?” I approach him, touching his elbow. He starts and shakes his head.
“A lot of magic here. None of it friendly.”
“Like, poised against us?” I ask.
“No.” He frowns. “Not yet.”
“Well.” I try a smile in the darkness. “That’s not ominous at all.”
I trot back over to the ropes as the sailors call for help, the hunger straining against my muscles and my common sense in tandem as Lucien lets the reins go, and I rein it back in. The combined strength of the hunger and the nervous sailors is just barely enough. I suddenly feel a warmth behind me, another body, and turn my head to see Lucien pitching in to haul the very end of the rope. I smile, and on the captain’s signal, we heave and twist until the winches clatter in place, and the sails come down entirely. Belowdeck the sailors start to row, wood cutting turquoise water rhythmically.
Finally, through the gloom and the chanting of the rowers, lights start to appear. At first I think it’s the other side of the cliff shelf, but then I realize it’s too white. Too bright to be sunlight diffused all over. A torch? But it’s not a dot of light at all—it’s a line, long and arcing like a rainbow with none of the color. When we get closer I realize it’s built into the rock wall, above an entryway. And below that entryway is a port made of volcanic black rock waiting for us, polished smooth and jutting strong into the lapping ocean water.
The ship pulls gently into one of the many black-rock docks, though it doesn’t seem like rock at all with how sleekly it’s been sanded down. It smacks of glass, and specifically of the raw dark glass in the High Witches’ tower, and I suppress a shudder. These aren’t the witches, I remind myself. These are polymaths. Correction: warrior-polymaths.
The best in the world.
And they’re waiting for us.
A row of figures in silver robes, just…waiting. Hoods up. It’s more than a little intimidating. The captain orders the anchor dropped, and half the sailors are busy lashing rope between the dock and the ship when the first figure steps forward and lowers their hood. It’s a woman, her face thin and lean and yet heavy with two large, gray eyes, like sacks of translucent fog.
The captain looks between her and us, then jerks her head. “Go on. We’ve got no business with them, just their cargo.” She turns to the sailors. “All right, start unloading, boys! The faster we get these damn barrels off the ship, the faster we can go home!”
The sailors scrabble, and the four of us straighten and ready ourselves, Malachite letting the gangplank clap down on the glassy dock. Fione hefts her waterproof book pouch higher, her fingers on the laces gripping white.
“Nervous?” I ask her as we walk down.
She murmurs through gritted teeth, “Let Lucien do the talking.”
“No fun,” I pout.
“Please.”
“All right,” I sigh, putting my hands behind my head leisurely.
Malachite elbows me as he passes. “Hands down. Try to look interested in what they’re saying.”
I feign innocence and outrage. “Why is it me you’re all harping on? I’m capable of not ruining things, too!”
“In theory,” Malachite groans. Fione’s too nervous to say anything more, and we all follow Lucien as he draws even with the line of silver robes. I see him square his shoulders minutely, head high. The prince has arrived.
“I am Prince Lucien Drevenis d’Malvane of Cavanos.”
“You are greeted.” The woman with the limpid eyes looks him up and down. “What do you seek from the Black Archives, Prince Lucien?”
Lucien’s dark gaze slices over to Fione for a split second, and she steps up and says, “We wish to find a way to interfere with the Bone Tree.”
The line of silver hoods look to one another ever so slightly. Most of them stare straight forward, and I can’t help but wonder where Yorl is in all this. The woman herself doesn’t so much as blink.
“And what knowledge have you brought to replace the knowledge you will take?”
I see Fione take a deep breath, steadying herself. She unlaces the strings of her pouch with deliberate slowness and pulls out the green-backed book. She opens it to a page, holding it out so the woman can see.
“An Old Vetrisian book. It speaks of the Trees.”
The woman steps closer, pulling a monocle out and peering at the writing, and then at the writing on the spine. She straightens quickly, eyes hardening on Fione and her monocle dropping on its chain.
“We have this book already. The rough draft, to be more precise. What we will gather from your book will be too slight a repayment for what you seek.”
The line of silver robes suddenly speaks all at once, scaring me out of my skin: “So it has been deemed.”
And just like that, the line turns. The woman makes a soft bow, the goodbye sort—utterly dripping with finality—and Lucien looks at me and I look at Malachite and he looks at Fione but she’s frozen, hands trembling on the book cover.
“Magic?” Malachite snaps at Lucien. “You could tell ’em about that skinreading shit. It’s rare, right?”
“Not rare enough.” He shakes his head. “Surely you know a few tricks about hunting valkerax, Mal. You could tell them—”
“No way. Every kid in Pala Amna knows—”
With each step the silver robes take, Fione’s face falls further, deeper into a pit of despair. I can see it happening right in front of me. In her mind, in our reality, Varia is slipping further and further away.
“Wait!”
I shout before I think. The silver robes pause, the woman looking over her shoulder with a decidedly anticipatory aloofness. Waiting. I settle mentally, deep in the sand, sinking to the bottom of the ocean of stillness inside myself. The hunger falls away, down into darkness. When I open my eyes again, it’s six worlds. Six views of the world, of the woman’s gray gaze going wide. Hot blood tears sluice down my cheeks, one from each eye.
“Weeping,” I say. “I can tell you about that.”
Next to me, I see Lucien watching me. Nervous, and yet proud. There’s a beat before the woman walks up to me, pressing the monocle into her eye and looking me over. I feel like a piece of meat hanging on a butcher’s hook as she circles me slowly.
“We already know of Weeping,” she says tersely. “We know of the valkerax who Weeps, we know of the Heartless who Weeps, and we know of its mechanisms. This was our newest initiate’s kingsmedal project.”
Yorl. She must mean Yorl. He detailed it all, it’s true—my every interaction with Evlorasin, my every thought about Weeping and how to do it. The whole time he was scribbling in that dungeon arena beneath Vetris, he was signing the d
eath warrant for this moment. Even through the perfect emotional peace and stillness, my chest deflates. My one advantage, gone. Just like that.
Fione darts forward. “Please, whatever I can do, the book, my uncle’s white mercury research—”
The begging sounds wrong in her voice. Unnatural. Fione is sweet, she’s smart, she’s determined. But she’s always had her pride. Until now. Until her hope and her love for Varia were cut away all at once with this woman’s words. The woman doesn’t look at her, doesn’t so much as acknowledge what she’s said. She turns, and it’s a decision. A rejection. The sound Fione makes at my side tears me in half—like a lone wolf dying on a winter’s night. She sinks to her knees, her tears splattering on the volcanic glass. Lucien’s posture sags, the hope draining from him, too. Malachite’s face twists and his mouth opens but he never gets the chance because the woman speaks again, clear.
“However, our newest initiate failed to mention a Heartless with six eyes like a valkerax.”
Fione’s head snaps up, gaze glimmering fiercely through her tears. Lucien helps her to her staggering feet, and she juts forward instantly, voice breaking. “Does that mean—”
The woman turns to face us, extending her hand to me. In her palm is a black-glass medallion, etched with a dizzying gold and silver symbol of some sort, like a flower opening or a star exploding.
“You may enter,” she says coolly to me. “And you may learn from our books. As we may from your body. Is this trade acceptable?”
I glance at Lucien, and the worry is clear on his face. What are they planning to do to me? I can see it flash across his mind. He tries to speak first.
“We—”
“Yes.” I cut him off. The woman nods, and the silver robes suddenly speak, so loud this time it thunders around the sea-lit dock.
“So it has been deemed.”
19
THE BLACK ARCHIVES
“Can I be the first to say these guys are freakin’ weird?” Malachite offers under his breath as the silver robes lead us under the white-mercury-lit arch and into a long black glass hall.
“Like a cult,” Lucien agrees softly next to me.
“And the New God churches aren’t?” I posit lightly. “Let’s just get what we came for, and go.”
Fione’s totally quiet, marching on the heels of the woman with a single-minded determination. I try to keep up with her, no matter how much the fear is pulling me apart at the seams as the Weeping fades. Lucien offers me his handkerchief, and it’s a wordless moment of comfort as I wipe the blood tears from my face.
“I’ve ruined so many of these,” I laugh as I hand it back to him. “Sorry.”
“Hopefully you won’t have to ruin any soon,” he says, dark eyes roaming over my face. He thumbs away a speck of blood, smiling as bravely as he can. But he’s just as scared as I am. Maybe more. Whatever these librarians want to do to me, I can endure. I’ll survive, no matter what. That’s what being a Heartless means. And enduring the pain is the choice I’ve made. I can do it, if it’s for him. For the good of everyone. But he needs to hear that.
“If it’ll get Varia back, I can do it,” I reassure him.
He stares, then lets out a breath. “I know. But I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Hey, c’mon. It’s the only thing I’m good at. Let me have it.” I wink, and then go somber when he doesn’t smile at all. “Let me do this.”
“I already know there’s no ‘letting’ you do anything. You’re going to do what you’re going to do, because you’re Zera Y’shennria, and you never listen to anyone who isn’t your own unheart.”
My smile mirrors his—wry and knowing. The white light flashes over his face as we ascend a wide staircase, and I’ve never been more grateful to have him. To have someone who knows me, what I’m like at my very core. I used to be afraid of it. And maybe I still am. But right now, I’m just thankful.
The silver robes lead us deeper and up into the Archives, past what look like blocks of countless dizzying dungeon cells and up, up into a winding staircase lined with white mercury stripes. They’ve figured out how to make the lights into glass bars, instead of the glass lamps I’m used to from Vetris, and they wind around the walls in efficient, stark, otherworldly patterns, almost like blocky, precise veins in a body. This place feels…ancient. Deep and old, like the valkerax. But the technology screams of bleeding-edge newness—newer than even Breych with its airships and ultra-efficient white mercury lights—and the contrast makes me uneasy more than anything.
“It’s like a fortress,” Lucien marvels.
The leader speaks again, voice echoing. “We are about to enter the central library ward. Please keep your voices down to a minimum, and refrain from touching anything—”
“The usual,” Malachite grumbles.
“And, if you would, do not look directly at the machinery. It makes them rather uncomfortable.”
Malachite and Lucien and I all share a wary look. Uncomfortable? Since when do machines feel comfort?
Fione is still unmoved, her gaze straight ahead and fixed on the woman she follows stalwartly up the stairs. Not knowing what to expect, I lace my hand into Lucien’s, relieved when he laces his fingers in mine. Together. Together, at the very least.
The stairs finally flatten out, the view widening into a cavernous room of black glass. “Cavernous” doesn’t really cut it—this place is massive. The ceiling is so tall it utterly melts into forever-darkness. You could fit a hundred of the arenas where I trained Evlorasin into this one space. But the polymaths of the Black Archives have decided to fill every available inch of this seemingly infinite space with books. Not in the usual bookshelves, though—rather, the entire shell of the cavern is carved with hollows in which books are perfectly slotted. Thousands—no, millions. There are scrolls, too, stored in the traditional Avellish style—which is to say strung from copper rods by flax strands bookended with wooden slats. Dozens of scrolls hang from just one strand, looking like a string of butterfly cocoons swaying gently in an airless breeze.
And then there are the things that don’t even look like books—rotating copper orbs with specifically patterned indents, crosscuts of gelatin the size of walls with ink spirals of all colors frozen within them. What I presume to be polymaths in silver robes gather around these contraptions, peering into them and turning them with handles this way and that, as if…reading them? But that’s not possible—those things don’t even look like language. Language is with ink and words. Stranger still, no matter how high the bookshelves extend up, no matter the daunting distance the scrolls hang from, there are no ladders. But that—that doesn’t make any sense.
Malachite echoes my sentiments.
“How do they get up to those books when they need ’em?” He glowers. The line of silver robes accompanying us start to peel off in all directions, some toward the books, others to shadowed nooks.
“We approach the machines,” the woman says suddenly. “Walk with care.”
We feel them before we see them. The rumbling of the black stone floor is gentle at first, and then crescendos to a quaking, undeniable presence. Something is coming—something reminiscent of a valkerax with the way every gargantuan step shudders the bone. But it’s the sharp, acrid smell that makes me cover my nose, that makes Malachite hiss a soft swear under his breath.
“White mercury,” Lucien murmurs beside me.
“Highly refined,” Fione corrects him, but her next words are cut off as the source of the heavy steps rounds the corner. Slowly, a brass giant comes into view, shaped like a human and yet impossibly heavier, bulkier. Its face is smooth of all features, save for a small slot on the bottom where a mouth would be. The sheer clumsy bulkiness of it seems out of place among so much careful order and arrangement. With every movement of its pendulous arms and creaking knees, curls of white mercury steam exhale from its joints, spira
ling up into the archive air.
“Don’t stare.” Mal elbows me.
“And how do you propose that?” I breathe. “When it’s a man made entirely of metal?”
“Is there a man inside?” The beneather squints.
“Obviously not,” Lucien says.
“It’s moving on its own.” Fione’s determined facade slips for a moment, her marvel sparking her eyes with pale blue fire. “Incredible! It’s…automating!”
“We call them self-motivators.” The woman looks over her shoulder at us. “Though I suppose it’s been agreed to call them ‘matronics’ in the common vernacular.”
“Automatic motion, fueled by highly refined white mercury.” Fione leans in to look at the woman. “What type do you use? Qessen-red? Or perhaps starscreed? Is starscreed even strong enough to power something like this? What method of expulsion do you use to generate the energy?”
“Such questions are not of the sort you have traded information for,” the woman insists. “We move on.”
The gleam in Fione’s eyes doesn’t fade, her face riveted to the heavy steps of the matronic. It moves like a person, its gait wide with metallic hip flexors, but I’m more than a little put off by the fact it’s moving without seeing—no eyes on its face or anywhere else I can see. I can’t tell which sense it’s using to navigate, if any sense at all. A senseless creature made of metal, moving simply because it’s been made to. I can’t help but feel kinship with it.
“They aren’t…alive, right?” I ask the woman.
“They do not possess sentience,” she affirms, turning a corner and leaving the matronic behind even as all of us are surreptitiously glancing back at it. “Manmade sentience has only ever been accomplished by the Wave.”
