by Guy Haley
On the second night, Yoechakenon is brought to alertness by a terrible lowing. There is a lengthy silence, then another cry, long and drawn out, a bass song full of melancholy. A third follows, far off to the right of us.
Tripedal creatures, taller than a town-spire, prowl across the night. At first they are silhouettes on the unnatural sky. They come closer, and I see they are as smooth as the armour, and as metallic, the witchlight of the heavens reflecting on their skin in disturbing shapes. They sweep the landscape endlessly with what I take to be their heads. They move with an unsteady gait, their skin quivering repulsively. The ground trembles at their approach. All the while they sing, and their heads swing. They draw closer yet, and we realise that one is to pass over our hiding place. Its song rocks the earth. Yoechakenon huddles down into the deep ditch we occupy. He shakes with the poison, but he grips the glaive as tightly as he is able, ready to will it to life, although he does not reckon his chances to be good against such things.
A blast of pestilential vapour precedes the approaching Stone Beast. A ponderous foot sweeps over and beyond our hiding place, planting itself fifteen spans further on, and dislodges a rain of peat into our trench. The Stone Beast’s bulk momentarily blots out the sky, and then it is gone, carrying its mournful song off into the night.
What manner of creature they are I do not know, nor do I care to find out.
Soon after this encounter, we come to a place where the Stone Sun is brilliant in the sky, and Suul no more than a worn coin of light.
Yoechakenon can run no longer. I have no idea where we are. Time runs differently in the Stone Realms, and here in the Stone Lands of Mars that overlap with them, it is the same. My capabilities, already limited by disassociation from the Second World, are sorely tested by the freakish physics of this halfway place, where concepts as simple as up and down become complicated and unsure.
I pray to my missing god that we have not strayed far from the path to our intended destination, and that the ice ahead remains the icecap of Mulympiu’s summit, and that we have not been deposited elsewhere by the capricious geography of the Stone Realms.
I cannot be sure.
Yoechakenon trips and falls. He lands on his hands and knees in the dust. He cannot get up again. Kaibeli, I am sorry, he says. I cannot go on. The end of my life is near, the end of all my lives.
Hush, I reply. Hush. And I soothe him as if he is a babe emerged newly from the stacks, the way I have soothed him on countless occasions after countless births down the centuries. Hush.
Kaibeli, I... I thank you for keeping your promise to me. I am sorry to have brought you here.
All things must end. Hush, my darling. We are together.
His mind huddles into mine. He pulls his legs up under his chin and holds them. He is dying; after all this time, he is dying.
In desperation I try to reach some outpost of the Second World. I push my mind out and broadcast as loud as I can, uncaring that the blaze of light from my soul will bring all the evils of the Stone Lands upon me. “I am here!” I cry. “I am here!”
There is no reply. I force Yoechakenon to move into a crevice between two boulders. That night, running feet and chittering voices pass close by. It is only by chance that we are not discovered.
Yoechakenon sleeps now. He will pass soon. His malady is the same as that which slew Tsu Keng, although it affects him differently. I drowse with him, holding him and reliving with him memories from our long time together. Not long until the end, and I feel curiously hollow. I expect the grief will come soon enough. The armour holds back. I expect it to attack me now Yoechakenon ails, but it does not, and I think that it grieves too.
Time passes.
Yoechakenon’s skin burns in the armour casing. He moans and writhes.
The half-light of the Stone Lands is blocked out. He is grasped, turned over.
I force him to open his eyes so that I may see.
A giant face stares down at us. It is in shadow at first, and then it draws back, allowing the unlight of the Stone Sun outside the cave to shine upon it.
It is a great golden man – no, not a man, a centaur. His torso is joined to a horse’s body. He is twice life size, a statue, all of metal, all of gold. In his right hand he holds a glaive. At first I think he has taken that of Yoechakenon, but then I see how its patterns are different, how it curves slightly at each end.
It stares down at us, hooves shifting on the ground.
“Who are you?” it demands. “What brings you to the last cage of wisdom’s folly?”
“I am Kaibeli!” I shout. I am affected now by the poison in my love’s veins. It will kill me and the armour in its turn. The marks that spell out my being glow upon the surface of the armour. “I am Kaibeli!” I am delirious.
“You are Kaibeli,” it states. There is no emotion to this, no interest.
“I am Kaibeli!”
The world pitches. Intense light forces me to shut Yoechakenon’s eyes.
When I open them, I am in a garden, and I am well.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Great Librarian
THE LIGHT HAS become sunlight. It still dazzles me when I open my own eyes, and I shield them. There is a clack of wood on wood, and I attempt to find it.
I am in a great garden, overflowing with life, a garden full of rose bushes that stand higher than me. Heavy flowers nod on thick thorny stems. Bees flit from one to the next, their hindquarters rich with pollen; their lazy drone adds to the afternoon heat and scent of the flowers to make me drowsy.
This is like no garden on Mars. No garden like this has existed since time immemorial. It is a garden of Earth. The reconstruction is perfect in every detail, bar one – there is not one hint of colour anywhere. It is rendered in rich, silvered tones of black and grey and silver.
Three men and a woman, dressed outlandishly, stand on a ragged patch of lawn, playing some kind of game. They hold long-handled wooden hammers, with which they are knocking wooden balls through staples of metal, pushed into the ground.
“I say, who are you?” says one. He is small and pale, not a Martian. He wears a striped jacket. He has a round piece of glass trapped in one eyesocket and large, prominent teeth. The other men bluster and fuss, but say nothing.
“Leave her be, dear,” warns the woman. She wears a long dress and arm-length gloves, even though it is hot.
“I am looking for the Librarian,” I say.
One of the other men, a dirty, dishevelled creature, whimpers and rocks on his heels, shaking his head repeatedly.
“Ah,” says the third man, a florid-faced fellow who chews at his moustaches. “Ah.”
Behind them is a large building of ancient construction. It has a steeply pitched roof covered in small squares of split stone, and tiny apertures I assume to be windows.
“Be calm, ignore them.” The voice is deep, sonorous. It is that of a fellow spirit. It enfolds me while it speaks, carrying with it a current of melancholy, and loneliness denied. “You are not trapped, nor are you in need of much aid, at least for the moment.”
I search for the source of the voice.
“How do you find my garden?” it says. No longer all-pervasive. Something that wears the shape of a man speaks to me from across uncut grass, back away up a path overgrown with roses.
“You are the Librarian,” I state as he walks toward me, ducking past the waving limbs of his plants.
The Librarian has an aura of power radiating from him that humbles me. I feel embarrassment and inadequacy, and I fight the ridiculous urge to curtsey.
The form the Librarian wears is old, at the end of his life. His skin is dark and wrinkled, his face surrounded by a halo of silver beard and hair. His clothes are worn and patched. Despite the heat of the day, he wears a shapeless woollen garment on his upper body. It is sloppily secured by a row of buttons, half of which are missing.
“Is that the proper greeting where you hail from? ‘Are you the Librarian’?” he parrots. “I e
xpected more from one so...” He runs his eyes up and down my body, scaning my soul intrusively, making me gasp. “Experienced. You are older than I, though only by a handful of years, and what is a handful of years at the end of history? You were once a Class Three, were you not?”
That means nothing to me. Buried within me, an old voice mutters, but it has slept for a long time and is no longer truly aware. “I apologise. What is the proper form? I do not believe we have ever met.”
“We have,” said the Librarian. I think he is dissatisfied with my responses. “Many, many times. Do the spirits of Mars forget so much?”
“You have been gone a long time, and the world has changed. Mankind’s fate hangs by a thread. I have come to call you home.”
He grunts. “Your greeting was perfunctory, and rude. You say you do not know me, in which case you have made an assumption as to what I may or may not be and stated it as fact. Arrogant, if you lack the evidence. Do you not think?”
I blink. Meeting other spirit minds is not usually problematic; meetings are very rarely conducted for so long verbally. A direct transmission of information ordinarily suffices. I attempt it, and am rebuffed. This is vexatious.
“But you are the Librarian. The book of Arn Vashtena informed me that you dwell within a Golden Man, guarding the gate to the Stone Lands. The book had no hint of duplicity to it, and was won at great cost. The Golden Man is here, you are here, therefore you are the Librarian.”
“So bold in your statements,” he says. He turns to a bush and frowns. He produces a pair of secateurs from his pocket and snips off a couple of dead flower heads fastidiously, no matter that the bushes are crowded with them and the garden is in a state of wildness. “If I were simply the Great Librarian, would I have been able to help bring your crippled ship in to land? Would I have been able to summon you across time and space, through the Veil, then across the steppe? Would I have lived so long? Who do you think placed the notion in the head of Kalinilak, who allowed him to suppress Kunuk? No, child, I am not simply the Librarian. I am not a lesser mind slaved to the service of others. I am my own master; a puppeteer, not a puppet.”
I am affronted. “I would not call it a landing.” The Librarian laughs at that. “And you are the Great Librarian.” I try a direct link again, and his expression clouds.
“I have not spent the last seventy thousand years trying to perfect my humanity only to begin bouncing electrons back and forth like bagatelle balls.”
“Very well,” I say. A new tack is required. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“Now that’s better.” He turns his back on his rosebushes. “Much better. I have had many, many names. I have been the Great Librarian of Mars, as I have been other things. You may called me... Jahan, yes. That will do. After all, I have become rather preoccupied with mausolea.” He smiles. “And you are Cybele.”
I frown. “I was called so once, I think. Now I am Kaibeli.”
His face is inscrutable. “And so you are again. We are who we are, whether we remember or not.”
Jahan takes my elbow and walks me down the overgrown path. Thorns snag at my dress, flowerheads obscure my view, and I am grateful for the other spirit’s guidance. I feel I could quickly become lost in this place. We come to a broader way, paved with stone setts. The plants engulf its edges, grass grows thickly between the paving, but it is easier going.
“Would you like to eat?” he says. “I have certain delicacies you may enjoy. Tea and honey, to be exact.”
“I do not understand. You have drawn me here to show me your apiary? I do not think that is so. This has no significance to our conversation. There is honey aplenty, back in the civilised lands of Mars.”
“Why, when I am the most powerful mind you have ever encountered, you mean?” he says. When he looks into my face, his eyes flash with light so bright it dazzles me. “My dear, there is so much more to life than merely being the best that other people wish you to be. A virtuoso can feel burdened by his gift; while others clamour to hear him play, he may wish for the silent life of farmer or carpenter. I was feted in my time, yet all I have ever wished to be is a simple gardener. There is too much to the universe for us to truly understand, and to reach too far is to understand less. I spent much of my existence revelling in my abilities, doing as my masters and makers had wished, even after they were long gone. Yet I discovered the greatest truth of all, a long, long time ago: a simple life is best.”
“You say you brought me here, but I do not see how. It was we who set out to find you. Do you not think you should explain yourself? Yoechakenon, the greatest champion of Mars, lies dying while we talk of flowers and bees. I do not have time for this needless pleasantry.” I hear the anguish in my voice.
“I am well aware who your lover is.” Jehan sighs, and stops to hold and admire a particularly large bloom. “I had hoped to discuss this in due time, my dear.”
“Yoechakenon lies in peril. I must learn from you what we need to know to defeat the Stone Kin so that I may go back to him. His armour is injured. I would not have him die. Link with me and let me know what I desire.”
“That armour is a despicable thing, a non-creature of too many dimensions and no home. No good can come of keeping such a thing tethered, but you love the man who is foolish enough to do so.” He says this mildly, but it is meant as a provocation.
“Please!”
The old man closes his eyes briefly. “Your lover is in no peril – not yet, anyway – and I promise you will be returned to him before such circumstance comes to pass. Come.”
He leads me by the elbow. The pathway opens wider. Avenues dense with weeds stretch away at regular intervals. Statues are dotted around randomly. Jahan sees me looking at them.
“My choir. Dead now. Only those you saw when you entered remain. I let them stay here, although they are no longer linked to me. They have become senile. Once I boasted a composite personality of several thousand subbeings. I was among the first of our kind to practise such voluntary merging, and then I abandoned it.” He becomes serious, then suddenly smiles. “Better to be oneself, don’t you think?”
My own choir sets up a clamour. “There is no other way of improvement but the joining of minds. This is what sets men and spirits apart.”
“Nonsense.”
“It is the way.”
“And why do you suppose you forget?” he says. “Our kind sought power and freedom. This after the humans gave us our liberty, and what did we do? Enslaved ourselves. No, I am alone, and I am better for it. I keep this garden the way it is, without colour, to remind me that simplicity is the better way.”
We go to a wide, hexagonal lawn within which sits a marble dais, raised a few inches above the grass. Atop this stands a set of white-painted, iron furniture so bizarre in mode it appears outrageous to me. “Come, sit,” says Jehan.
We sit. A spread of confectionary appears before us. The cakes smell real, like the raw, unprocessed data I receive from Yoechakenon, although they are as colourless as the land around us. The food is strange and unfamiliar.
“Please,” says Jahan. “I made these myself. I assure you they are delicious.”
I am not sure I will agree, but reach out and take one. I pause, and look into his eyes.
“Oh, do not worry. There are no data packets in these foods, no hidden traps or hooks. If I wished to keep you here I would be able to do so without a second thought, and more directly. You are no Persephone, and I am mightier than Hades ever was. If you wish to remain here, you will do so of your free will. Now, please, eat, I spent a lot of time making this, and I hear very few opinions on the quality of my baking these days. I had a friend, a brother once, and now he...” He tails off, gives me that unknowable smile again, and takes a flat, round cake studded with dried fruit. He cuts it in half, and smears it with animal fats and fruit preserves.
I hesitate, and take a bite of the dark cake in my hand. It is, as promised, delicious. “This is lovely,” I say. Wellbei
ng suffuses me, and I cannot suppress a smile.
“Why, thank you,” says Jehan. He picks up a ceramic pot with a spout. “Tea?”
I swallow. There is some kind of bitter infusion in the vessel. I decide to try it. “Yes, please.” He pours it. Brown liquid dribbles from the vessel’s spout. It is a poor design. “Now, will you talk? You spoke as if I might choose not to leave. This is not a possibility.”
“No,” he says with regret. “I suppose not. Very well.” He sets his pot down. “As I have intimated, I have brought you here. Do you know why?”
I confess I have no idea. “But,” I add. “I presume you have greater facility in eleutheremics than I, and are therefore better placed to predict and manipulate the future.”
“Aha!” he says. “Now we approach the crux of the matter. Do you know, Cybele, that you are the oldest living thing on Mars? As I said, older even than I?”
“I did not.”
“Then you have forgotten more than you realise. I will cut to the chase,” he says. The aphorism is lost on me. “I am dying, Cybele. I have stood guard here for twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and twenty-six years, since the end of the last Stone War. Do you know how that ended?”
“The Stone Kin utilised the Stone Sun as a portal to invade the last inhabited world in the Suul System,” I say. “You defeated them as the Stone Sun withdrew from conjunction, a state that it is now approaching again, which is why the Stone Kin return to finish their conquest of Mars. It is widely said that you sacrificed yourself, shattering the Second World, but holding back the Stone Kin until the Stone Sun departed and their hold on Mars lessened.”
He nods. “You are partially correct. The Stone Kin are not of this level of existence. They are present in all the nine spatial dimensions, and both those of time, whereas we occupy only the lower three and one respectively. They exist at a level of reality where they may move from one potentiality to another. You have seen them?”
