Interlude
FROM THE SAFETY OF THE Wesah encampment, Grandmother had watched the Sophians abandon their great black engines of death and converge on the Anchor, where they were swallowed up by its tall arched gateways. The plains and hills went dark, abandoned by all but the Wesah. Even the usually busy roads around the capital were empty, as if the world had magically reverted to some simpler, earlier time.
The woman now known as Andromède had given her orders to the tribe not long after Sophia’s advance. She was tempestuous, this one—half Fox and half Wolf. Or perhaps half Fox and half Crow. Her strategy was certainly clever enough; it was also dangerous, fueled by fear and thoughts of vengeance. Though Grandmother mourned her fellow sisters and wished to see Chang punished, there could be no question that the tribe’s best chance of survival was to flee north, as the old Andromède had planned. To continue to fight now was to court total annihilation.
But fight they would. Such was their new chieftain’s command. Only the gods knew if she was wise beyond her years or foolish in line with them.
Three tribeswomen had been ordered to stay back and protect Grandmother, but she’d quickly shamed them into leaving her alone by accusing them of cowardice. She watched them ride off toward the city, the sun rising like a flat red stone behind the Anchor skyline, and couldn’t help but feel the thrill of the hunt in the air. Perhaps that was a flaw of their people, that hunger for danger, for victory; but perhaps it would also be their salvation.
On a whim, she took up her walking stick and abandoned the otherwise empty encampment, crunching over the dead, gray ash where the missives had prepared the tribe’s last meal, and made her way over to the Peretemps River—what the Anchorites called the Tiber. Rain pattered gently on the grassy green banks, falling from a sky of mottled granite. Fat salmon slipped between the rocks, disturbing the minnows. A frog splashed into the water and paddled off with its herky-jerky, illogical limbs. The otsapah picked a cattail and let it dangle beside her as she went, drawing lines in the mud. She was just about to head back to camp when she spotted something odd floating toward her. At first she thought it had to be a carcass of some kind—the wrong shape for a person, but perhaps a cow or horse. But as she and the mystery converged, it smoothed out into a metal cylinder, dully reflecting the clouds as it turned over. It stopped with a clang a few hundred feet upstream, caught between a pair of river rocks. White water gushed out from beneath it like a geyser. Grandmother found a place where she could descend to the waterline, though it was treacherous going, and she nearly slipped more than once.
She stepped gingerly across the wet stones that lined the riverbank. “Careful,” she said to herself. At her age, and on her own, there were falls she might not get up from.
It was an iron barrel, stenciled on either end with the outline of a book. Though it could have arrived there by accident—rolling off a wagon and into the river, for example—the otsapah sensed a purpose in it. The barrel was newly made, the paint freshly applied. The symbol was almost certainly a literal description of the barrel’s contents, which made sense; both Sophia and the Descendancy had always been obsessed with books. The dahor were so terrified of losing their stories, of forgetting and, by extension, being forgotten. The Wesah kept their stories alive by telling them. Paper burned, disintegrated, faded; memory was the hardier medium by far.
So here was a barrel full of books riding the river like a canoe. In the face of possible extinction, the Anchor was sending its stories out into the world, finally sharing that which it had always insisted on keeping to itself. Grandmother planted her feet in the muddy bank and reached out with her walking stick. The first thrust skittered across the top of the nearer river rock. The second plunged past it into the water. On the third, she drew a sonorous pong from the barrel and knocked it free. It landed with a splash and sped off downriver, toward its intended destination.
Or maybe there was no destination, no more intention here than in the cry of a dying animal. Maybe the only hope for this desperate exudation was that someone—an old woman left behind by her sisters because she was no use in a fight, for example—would take notice of it. In the aftermath, if this old woman were still around, she might let people know about the barrel of stories she’d seen in the river. Maybe those people would manage to recover it.
It was even harder getting back up the bank than it had been coming down, but the otsapah managed it. She could no longer make out the sun for the clouds, but from the disposition of light, knew it had to be past noon. The Western Gate was wide open, unoccupied but for the corpses of Sophians—the sacrificial lambs of the vanguard. By now, the Protectorate would have retreated to some more defensible position elsewhere in the city. The sounds of battle carried across the plains like a Wesah drumbeat, its rhythm gone feral, unpredictable.
Gunfire like feet crunching on gravel.
Swords and daggers clashing like an iron barrel banging along the rocky bottom of a river.
Screams like curses. Curses like screams.
The end was near. Grandmother would not watch it from a distance. These were her people; this was her fight. She said a quick prayer to Crow, then another to Wolf, then another to Fox. The gods would forgive her fickleness; today the Wesah nation needed all the help it could get. She set her gaze on the Western Gate and began the long, slow walk.
Part III VICTORS
If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.
—Simone de Beauvoir, All Men Are Mortal
1. Clover
CLOVER WATCHED THE CENTRAL DESK where Bernstein sat, turning first this way and then that to address the questions of one or another attendant. Kita had left the note with him a few minutes ago, but only now did he pick it up and glance at its contents. An impressive impassivity—he put it down and casually answered another couple of requests before excusing himself and coming to stand over the desk where Clover and Kita were sitting.
“You’re sure?” he said, with the bland expression of someone asking after the weather.
Kita nodded. “I know what Blood of the Father smells like. My parents helped to smuggle it into the city a few times.”
“I should have guessed,” Bernstein said. “Why else would Chang have left so few soldiers? It’s not as if they could hold this place against Sophia.”
“So what do you think they’re waiting for?” Clover asked. “Why haven’t they started burning the place down already?”
“I suppose they’ve been told to wait until they’re certain the Library is about to fall into enemy hands.”
“How many are there?” said Kita.
Bernstein frowned. “How many soldiers? In the whole building? Twenty. Maybe twenty-five.”
“Well, you’ve got nearly ten times that many attendants! Tell them to fight!”
“Chang’s men are armed to the teeth. My fellows don’t know one end of a sword from the other.”
Clover tried to picture all those attendants, many of them hunched and squinty-eyed from a lifetime spent poring over books, going toe-to-toe with two dozen Protectorate soldiers. He could see the fat leather-bound volumes used as shields, quickly cloven in two with one downward swing of a sword. He could hear all their well-reasoned pleas and propositions cut short by the eloquent rebuttal of a pistol. No, Chang’s men could never be convinced to spare the Library. They had no respect for knowledge, no understanding of what it would mean for humanity if all these books were lost.
But perhaps the Sophians were different.
“I have an idea,” Clover said. “But it means Kita and I will have to leave.”
“So go on, then,” Bernstein replied. “I never wanted you up here in the first place.”
* * *
They sat against the trunk of one of the skeletal apple trees in the Library gardens. Clover had hoped it would shield them from the rain, but the branches only collected the water and delivered it in larger, more irritating drops. There were tiny diamonds i
n Kita’s eyelashes, and he noticed, maybe for the first time, that she really was quite pretty.
“I’m sorry I got you into all this,” he said.
She smiled, let her head drop onto his shoulder. “I could say the same.”
They stayed like that for a while, watching the sun climb through the clouds and waiting for the inevitable to arrive. The sounds of battle came over the wall that separated the Library from the rest of the city, growing louder every minute. At last they appeared at the gates to the Library gardens, filing through three or four abreast. No uniforms or pageantry—just a few hundred of the men and women Zeno had drafted from the towns and villages around Sophia, who believed in her message of progress. Clover scanned their faces. He’d hoped the director herself might lead this division, but no such luck; she knew better than to expose herself to such a dangerous mission.
“I still can’t believe you’re going to try and talk your way out of this,” Kita said.
“Well, I’m a whole lot better at talking than I am at fighting, so I figure it’s my best shot.” Clover stood up and brushed off his pants. “Stay here, okay? I know you don’t usually listen when I ask that, but—”
“Good luck,” she said, taking his hand and kissing it.
He walked downhill toward the gates, toward the fifty guns trained on him from the moment the Sophians noticed his approach. One woman came forward to meet him, and they shook hands beneath the eerie, outstretched branches of a squat oak tree. She was perhaps forty years old, her brown hair shot through with gray, and she wore two silver pistols at her waist and a bandolier glistening with brass bullets over her shoulder. Bloodstains spattered her thin leather jacket.
“Is this a parley?” she said with playful threat.
“Something like that,” Clover replied.
“Somehow I doubt a boy your age has been tasked with speaking on behalf of the Descendancy.”
“I’m speaking on behalf of the Library.”
“The Library is the Descendancy.”
“Not anymore. Not since Chang.”
The wind picked up, whipping rain across the gardens. “Say your piece, child.”
Clover took a deep breath. “The Grand Marshal’s given orders to destroy the Library if you all try to take it.”
“He’s not defending it?”
“There are a few soldiers inside, but not enough to hold you back. They’re probably watching us right now. If you go any farther, they’ll burn the whole thing down.”
The woman raised an eyebrow. “You gotta admit, this would be a pretty clever way to try and trick us into turning around.”
“It would.”
The woman spat, turned to look at her ragtag army. “See those folks there? A whole bunch of ’em just found out that their hometown’s been destroyed. That they’ve got nowhere to go back to. And now you’re telling me I should help you preserve whatever’s inside this… this… castle here?”
“Whoever wins the war is gonna need what’s in that castle. Zeno as much as Chang.”
The woman considered for a moment. “Fuck me,” she said. Then she wiped her wet hands on her wet trousers and plodded back through the mud toward the other Sophians. Clover retreated to the apple tree where Kita waited.
“Did it work?” she asked.
Clover shrugged. He could see the woman gesticulating, hear her voice as a whisper on the wind. Other voices were raised in response. Faces twisted up in anger. One man shoved another, and it took a dozen people and a couple of warning shots to break up the fight. Shoulders slumped; heads grudgingly nodded. The woman turned to Clover and raised a hand: a valediction. Clover waved back as the army began to retreat. A few minutes later, the last of the Sophians passed back through the gates.
He looked to Kita and smiled. “Not bad, huh?”
“Not bad at—” She was interrupted by the sound of glass shattering. Clover looked up just in time to see a body plummet from one of the Library’s highest windows and land with an audible crack in some interior courtyard; through the broken glass, he could make out the flicker of fire.
Too late. All for nothing. They sprinted back to the Library and once again took the Innocent Steps up to the fifth floor, tearing down the hallway and through the Rotunda doors.
The tranquil reading room that they’d left scarcely twenty minutes ago was now like an image out of the most harrowing chapters of the Filia’s Book of Ivan. The walls of books were all alight, along with most of the desks and tables; flaming pages flapped around the room like phoenixes, setting new fires wherever they landed. Corpses littered the floor, and some of those were on fire as well; the smell of cooked meat was subtle but undeniable. Though the soldiers had abandoned their guns for fear of friendly fire, they still had their swords, and while those attendants still standing fought tooth and nail, they were hopelessly outclassed. Clover scanned the room for Bernstein, praying the old man wasn’t among the fallen.
“Look out!” Kita cried.
He reacted just fast enough to dodge a graceless, plunging sword strike and turned to face the soldier who’d snuck up behind him. A boy about Clive’s age, holding his sword with both hands—he feinted a couple of times, laughing at his opponent’s seeming helplessness. Meanwhile, just behind him, Kita was lighting a broken chair leg off one of the many local fires. All she had to do was touch it to the soldier’s uniform to send him screaming, swinging his sword at the air.
There was no time to celebrate. Clover had just spotted Bernstein and a couple of attendants struggling to pull a large bookshelf away from the wall.
“What happened?” Clover shouted over the clamor. “I talked to the Sophians! They were going to leave us be!”
“As soon as the guards heard those gunshots outside, they made their move,” Bernstein shouted back. The bookshelf fell forward, landing in a shower of sparks and ash and revealing the secret door behind it. Bernstein pulled it open and gestured the closest attendants through.
“What’s in there?” Clover said.
“A way out,” Bernstein said.
“You don’t have to tell me twice!” Kita said, and dashed through the doorway. She was quickly followed by another few attendants.
“We have to put the fire out!” Clover said.
“Absolutely,” Bernstein replied. “We’ll find a way once we’re out of here. Go on!”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. How can we put out the fire if—”
The old man wasn’t particularly strong, but he caught Clover by surprise, shoving him backward through the doorway. A large attendant came in just behind, knocking Clover off balance, and by the time he found his feet again, the door had already slammed shut. He ran to it, pounding on the wood.
“Bernstein! What are you doing?”
Kita pulled at his jacket. “Clover, come on. He’s giving us time to get away.”
Clover shook her off, placing his ear against the door, as if he might discern some word of farewell, of consolation—but there was nothing.
He couldn’t remember exactly what happened after that. Flashes of room after room full of fire. The smell of burnt paper, burnt fabric, burnt flesh. In one hallway, the surreal image of a man wreathed in flames sprinting as fast as he could away from them, toward some imaginary succor. The very stones seemed to weep heat; strata of smoke stretched from ceiling to floor. A couple of older attendants went down on their knees coughing and never got up again. At last they found a stairwell, but it became impassable two floors down, masonry toppled where the wooden ribs of the building had given way, so they had to find another route downward through the labyrinth, led by blackened and bloody attendants whose tear tracks were visible through the soot on their cheeks. Time passed—a minute? An hour?—and then they were suddenly free, having escaped through some side door Clover hadn’t even known existed, which opened onto the portion of the garden where herbs and vegetables were grown. The rain was still falling, but not nearly heavily enough to slow the fire, which could
now be seen blazing in dozens of windows up and down the Library’s facade. They stood and watched—Clover, Kita, and those attendants who’d survived the massacre in the Rotunda—as the collected knowledge of the centuries turned to cinders.
Eventually they stumbled on, back through the gardens, through the ash falling like snow all around them, and out through the gates.
Kita screamed, reared like a spooked horse. Before them stood a pile of at least two hundred human bodies. Clover recognized the face of the Sophian woman who’d convinced her fellow soldiers to leave the Library in peace. She was near the bottom of the pile, eyes wide, an arrow through her neck.
Something moved at the end of a nearby alleyway. Then several somethings.
Clover pulled Kita close. “Who’s there?” he said.
2. Paz
DANIEL HAMILL’S LAUGHTER DEVOLVED INTO a breathless coughing fit. He spat blood into the dirt. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“We had to,” Clive said quietly. “Chang has Flora.”
“I saw her.” Cough. “Wouldn’t say a word to me.” Cough. “Or to anyone.”
Paz couldn’t believe Daniel was still alive. It had been days since he’d been shot. Chang must have given him some measure of medical attention—though it looked as if the efficacy of those treatments had reached its limit. But why not just let him die? “What does Chang want with you?” she said.
“Information. He wants to know if Zeno has any other tricks up her sleeves.”
“Does she?”
Daniel smiled a mouthful of red-rimmed teeth—fresh blood. “Always.”
“You didn’t tell him anything?” Clive asked.
“Not a word. I imagine that’s why he told you to come here. He thought I might break if I had to watch him torture you.”
“Would you have?”
Daniel hesitated, hedged. “It doesn’t matter now. You took too long to get here. Chang’s not coming back. He’s gone to make his stand. Gone to… to…” His eyes fluttered, rolled back in his head.
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