In Dark Service

by Stephen Hunt

  Fertile golden fields of corn stretched out in between the woodland, slowly swaying in the gentle breeze. All owned by the Landors. Occasionally Jacob could see the mist of smoke from a fermentation tower, spherically stacked processors distilling corn oil into various strengths as well as producing ethanol. Landor’s improved fermentation process had been the source of his fortune, his invention allowing him to squeeze out as much as a quarter more refined ethanol than any other landowner. Allowing him to buy up most of the farmland around Northhaven, too. It would be the landowner’s son and daughter’s fortune, one day. And the expanse of cornfields a reminder to Carter of all he didn’t have to offer the girl he had set his heart on, every day he went to work. An hour out of town, Jacob caught sight of the library, their cart rounding a rise cut through pine woodlands. The road wound down through a valley and then up towards a series of foothills. Cut into the opposite slope stood the library’s concrete entrance, big metal blast doors locked into place, a series of circular air vents rising out of rocks overgrown by shrubs and vines. In front of the entrance lay an area of flat dirt where travellers could draw up, a caravan already resting there. It must have arrived recently. A couple of wagoners waited outside the doors, speaking to library staff through an intercom. The caravan towered two storeys high, their living and home, both.

  Carter had arrived late for the day’s work and the staff inside weren’t in the mood to listen to Jacob’s apologies on behalf of his son, ordering Carter to handle business with the wagoners while his father repaid the cart driver’s kindness by helping him unload message crates.

  ‘I need sale prices for sheet glass,’ the older of the two wagoners explained to Carter, his accent making the words hiss slightly on each ‘s’. ‘For coastal towns within four months’ travel from here, as well as the dates and locations of market fairs that will be held along the route.’

  ‘Raise your right hand,’ said Carter, sounding bored. ‘Do you swear to carry no fire within the halls of the guild, and—’ he indicated a brass plate in the corner of the archway imprinted with the library’s rules ‘—abide by our ordinances and charges, as listed?’

  The two men grunted affirmation.

  ‘And payment?’ asked Carter.

  ‘Copper trading coins or rice,’ said the wagoner. ‘I’d prefer to pay from our rice sacks, see. Even dried, it’s not going to keep forever.’

  ‘Rice is fine,’ said Carter, having to work to keep the sarcasm from his voice. ‘You can never have too much rice.’

  Carter went to the intercom and had a brief conversation with the staff. A small sally port inside the blast doors opened, a librarian emerging with a metal detector which she passed quickly over the clothes of the travellers. She made a snide remark about Carter’s timekeeping before, satisfied the visitors were unarmed, allowing them access.

  Jacob hefted one of the message crates towards the open entrance, nodding at the librarian. ‘The most dangerous thing I’ve got is my son.’

  ‘Pass,’ said the librarian. ‘He’s more annoying than he is dangerous.’ She glanced at Carter and tapped her blue tunic and the guild emblem sown there – a courier pigeon hovering above two open books. ‘And you had better be dressed appropriately when you stand before the Master of the Codex, Carter Carnehan.’

  There was no natural light inside. Oil lamps illuminated a long stone corridor beyond the door. The corn oil smell made Jacob’s stomach rumble for the comforts of lunch. Inside – safe from fire, flood and bandits – the library’s subterranean labyrinth was laid out like a wheel. A massive six-storey chamber for a hub, shelf-lined corridors as its spikes. Corridors led to reading rooms and lifts and stairwells down to lower levels where non-guild members were not permitted. All libraries, Jacob understood, were built on a similar pattern, always defended as carefully against nature as against man. A second librarian came out to meet the two wagoners. He escorted the travellers down a spiral stairwell to the floor of the main chamber. There, they sat at a wooden table that could have hosted fifty for supper, the librarian leaving to retrieve ledgers with the requested calendars and trade prices. Carter came back a couple of minutes later looking ill at ease dressed in his formal tunic and was dispatched to unload the remaining message crates, piling them inside a dumb waiter where they were winched out of sight. When the Master of the Codex appeared he nodded towards Jacob, and, as the churchman hoped, pointed down a book-lined passage to one of the reading rooms for a private meeting. Whereas Carter made his librarian’s tunic look slovenly and ill fitting, Lucas Lettore wore his as if it had been hand-tailored to his short, fastidious frame.

  Jacob started with an apology when they were out of earshot of the central chamber, but Lucas was having none of it. ‘You warned me what to expect of your son, and he’s certainly lived up to expectations.’

  ‘He’ll settle,’ said Jacob, trying to keep any note of pleading from his voice. ‘Given time.’

  ‘Well,’ sighed Lucas. ‘If a churchman can’t have faith who can?’

  They ended up in a reading room, wood-lined walls concealing bare rock, a line of large map tables filling the centre of the room. The oil light from the lamp glass was just warm enough to make a man forget he was buried out of sight of the surface, standing here. Its illumination painted the wooden panelling a burnished orange, the arms of brass page-holders glinting across the tables.

  ‘There are plenty of young men kicking up, now they’ve been cut loose from their studies,’ said Jacob. ‘You can go into any Northhaven tavern and see the trouble that comes from apprentices downing their first pay packet in a single night.’

  ‘My guild hold isn’t a tavern,’ said Lucas, his eyes widening. There was something of the snake about those eyes, spiral-like. Sometimes Jacob expected them to spin if he stared too closely, trying to hypnot­ise him into taking his son back. ‘The guild offers more than a simple apprenticeship. Our life is a calling. After Carter’s first year probation, he will be expected to live inside the dormitory here, with home visits once a month or less. He could be assigned to another library.’ Lucas leaned over the map table, running his fingers across the contour lines of coasts and mountains on yards of paper unrolled before them. ‘You have to love what you do, Jacob. Your boy doesn’t have a passion for books and I can’t see him giving his life to preserving knowledge within the order. He can’t lay out type on a letterpress to save his life. When I ask him to update a ledger with what arrives from the radiomen, there are as many mistakes as words in his entries – and that’s if we can even find any volume he’s re-shelved. You can lock Carter’s body down here with us, but his mind’s been far-called. These are the only thing he’s ever paid any interest to inside the library. Our map tables.’

  ‘He’s not a traveller,’ said Jacob, ‘and my rectory is no caravan.’

  ‘Well,’ sighed Lucas, drawing the sound out. ‘Your son certainly isn’t any librarian. Those two wagoners you came in with; you know their accent isn’t the same as the one they were raised with, nor what they’ll end up speaking on their deathbed? The journey changes their accent, slowly, inevitably, with every mile they travel.’ Lucas tapped the long unfurled map. ‘This is a single tube’s worth of charts laid out here. About two-hundred million square miles. I’ve got another seven-hundred tubes in just this map room. I’ve lost track of how many map rooms we have inside the library. And what we have here is only a tiny slice of all that lies out there.’

  The journey changes the mind, but the mind can never change the journey. Jacob took the librarian’s point, but the nearly infinite size of the world outside Northhaven was precisely what he was worried about. ‘There’s a horizon full of land to swallow a soul out there, Lucas. What’s one man in the beyond, without friends or family to give him the foundations he needs to rely on?’

  ‘The furthest update I’ve ever received was from somewhere called Jhark,’ said Lucas. ‘The transmission stamp on the message puts it at about ninety million miles away. Physi
cally, I could ride a horse only a fraction of that distance in my lifetime. But up here—’ he tapped his head ‘—with our archives, I can make a fair stab of understanding what life is like there – or at least, what it was like when that message first started to pass down the radiomen’s relays. For you and I, that’s more than enough. For your son, it is not. He wants to see a piece of the infinite for himself. To feel it under his boots and experience it.’

  ‘Things are the same any place you travel to, consistent…’ Even as Jacob said the words, he knew he was trying to convince himself.

  ‘Consistently appalling, you mean, Pastor,’ smiled Lucas.

  ‘Carter’s talking about sneaking down to the harbour and trying to ship out unregistered,’ said Jacob. His hand passed west over the vast waters on the map, towards the blackened patchwork of feuding states along the opposite shore of the seven-thousand-mile-wide Lancean Ocean. ‘He’s liable to get himself drugged and sold to some mercenary company over the water. Enslaved in the Burn as cannon fodder for one of their warlords.’

  ‘My library isn’t a prison,’ said Lucas. ‘And there are safer ways of working the wanderlust out of a young man’s system.’ He passed his fingers over the countries of the Lancean League, the nations hugging the eastern coast. ‘Why not consider an apprenticeship for Carter with the Guild of Rails? He would be away a couple of years travelling the mainline circuit on a train – every league member as boring and civilised as we are in Weyland. He’d be back soon enough, after he realises that the water that runs through our neighbours’ land is no sweeter than the streams of home.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t come back? Things are meant to be better down south. Bigger cities, wealthier living.’

  Lucas laughed. ‘That’s merely a function of our kingdom’s position at the far end of the caravan routes. They still have resources somewhere down south, metals and ores and chemicals, and the caravans don’t have so far to travel to bring raw materials up to trade. Are you worried that Carter will be seduced by a life of ease? Do you think he is the sort of man who cares if he owns a machine that can cool and preserve food, or another that can steam his clothes clean?’

  ‘He might.’ Even as Jacob said the words, he heard the uncertainty in his own voice. How much of that was true and how much of it was an excuse? He and Mary had lost Carter’s two brothers to the plague, lost them far too young. The pain was meant to pass, eventually. Everyone said it would. But after a decade had gone by, there wasn’t a week that passed when Jacob didn’t think of his dead sons and mourn their loss. How much of what he and Mary did now was just trying to clutch onto Carter too tight for his own good?

  ‘In this matter, at least, I think you underestimate Carter,’ said the library hold’s master. ‘He yearns for adventure. I would be more worried about him heading north, to the real edges of the caravan route. There are northern states where they carry only swords and bows to repel the nomadic hordes of the Arak-natikh steppes. Countries situated too far away from the passage of ores to build even the simple life we enjoy in Weyland. No metal for machines in their towns. Not even lead type for a printing press. Only iron for the swords that protect your village. That’s what Carter thinks he wants. Not lanterns lit by the pulse of electricity, but the life of an adventurer or a sailor or a caravan guard. So, you must both compromise. Secure Carter a position with the Guild of Rails and point him towards the civilised heart of the league. Let him travel.’

  ‘Mary worries about Carter’s wild ways when he’s no further than a cart ride away from our home,’ said Jacob. ‘How can I sell her a couple of years riding a railway carriage?’

  ‘You’re a good man, Jacob Carnehan, but you worry too much. Sometimes matters just have to run their course.’

  Jacob sucked in his cheeks. Two years. And was he going to raise that little matter before or after he told his wife about having to drag Carter away from crossed sabres with the Landors’ heir?

  Carter trudged down the gallery of shelves as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders. Actually, it wasn’t the world’s weight. It was the barrel of water strapped to his back, a rubber hose attached to a spigot on its side… a wooden nozzle to refill humidifier boxes mounted on the wall like bird feeders every hundred yards.

  ‘Dry paper is dead paper,’ muttered Carter, aping the Master of the Codex’s voice as he soaked the sponge-like filling of the nearest box. ‘And books with dead paper will eventually die. Control the environment, limit the sunlight and the archives’ pages will prosper.’

  Hell, I’d be better off breaking my back in one of Benner Landor’s fields. At least I’d feel the wind on my face and the sun on my neck, watering something other than these old tomes.

  A librarian poked his head through the archway into the chamber, snapping Carter out of his mood of despondency. ‘Got a job. The master says you’re the lad for it.’

  ‘Really? Then I’m betting it’s not one of the better tasks on today’s rota.’

  The other man grinned. ‘I was late three days in a row during my apprenticeship. Master Lettore had me humping re-shelving crates for so long I thought I was on probation with the longshoremen, not the librarians.’

  Carter clipped the hose back onto the barrel. ‘Well, I’ve already unloaded the last message cart of the day, so I know there’s nothing heavy that needs humping.’

  ‘There’s an old tramp at the entrance, hollering and banging on the gate. Sounds as mad as a sailor marooned six months with only sun and seawater for company.’

  Isn’t that fine and dandy? Another way to punish me. ‘And what would the master like me to do?’

  ‘Deal with the vagrant, Mister Carnehan. Use your initiative.’

  Carter left the chamber, racked his humidifier in the storeroom and walked the stairs up five levels to reach the entrance. He slid open the sally door’s metal hatch to see what he was dealing with. Outside, the tramp had abandoned his attempts to communicate via the intercom and was dancing a mad jig around the caravan’s traveller children. Wide, watery eyes blinked as he capered and croaked a badly out-of-tune song. Happy to have new company, the children seemed delighted to frolic with the lunatic, although an old matriarch was keeping a wary eye on this exuberant newcomer. The object of Carter’s attention wore a bright brown leather coat that flapped around his riding boots, kicking up dust. Carter had never seen a coat like the one worn by the tramp, carefully etched with hundreds of intricate pictures as though they were tattoos in leather. In his hand he thumped a sturdy walker’s staff into the dirt, using it as a maypole to lift his legs off the ground. Hanging off the man’s jutting chin, a long straggly white beard swished through the air that surely would have benefited from the attentions of a bath and comb.

  Carter was half-tempted to leave him outside, cavorting for the travellers, and tell the Master of the Codex he had dealt with the vagrant. But the traditions of courtesy to strangers were too strong in Carter’s blood to allow him to lie, even if it meant having to talk to this odd-looking lunatic. Unlocking the sally port, Carter stepped outside in the sunshine and felt the brief joy of being in the open, not stuck in that badger warren of desiccated learning behind him.

  ‘Old man!’ Carter called to the tramp. ‘Over here.’

  Glancing up, a look of surprise creased his features. He halted his dance around the caravan, lurching forward towards the entrance. ‘Am I old?’ The tramp’s voice creaked like his words were being dragged over gravel, too many nights spent out under the stars with mossy woodland clearings for his mattress.

  ‘I’d say you are. Maybe sixty, seventy years?’

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t count that as old. Are you the baron?’

  ‘Baron of what?’

  The tramp jabbed his walking staff towards the metal gate buried in the hillside. ‘Of yonder castle…’

  ‘Isn’t much of a castle. That’s a guild hold, old man. The Guild of Librarians. You know… archives, knowledge?’

  ‘Ah, reading!’ s
miled the tramp. His teeth gleamed white and perfect. He’d clearly never wheedled enough coins for tobacco or whisky to stain them properly. There were dentists in Northhaven with poorer sets of dentures than his. ‘I do so love reading. And food, of course. A good meal. Nothing fortifies the soul more than reading a good book having first been served with a hearty stew.’

  Carter took the hint. ‘If you’re claiming visitor’s poverty, I can enter you in the Ledger of Salt and Roof and give you a drink and a feed.’

  ‘Poverty? Why, young man, I am insulted! Yes, I am. I shall pay, naturally.’

  ‘You can pay?’

  ‘Of course, through the telling of fine tales.’ He ran a finger along the images on the leather coat. ‘All of these are stories. I have recounted them to kings and presidents and sultans and princes and emperors the length of Pellas – all have been entertained and none have been left disappointed.’

  Well, the hobo hasn’t met the Master Codex; there’s a man who’d surely slid out of his mother’s womb with a disappointed look on his face. Pellas. The hobo had used the archaic, formal name for the world. Not a word you often heard. A bard then, with a sideline in panhandling.

  Carter reluctantly led him through the entrance. ‘Let’s just enter you in our Ledger of Salt and Roof, and call it quits. One meal, mind, and you can’t sleep inside. Only the guild’s members are allowed to sleep underground. There are a couple of log shelters down a path behind that caravan there. They belong to us. You’re welcome to bunk in one of them for a while.’

  ‘If I do that, I won’t be able to see the stars, and I do so enjoy the stars’ company.’

  ‘I’ll need your name for the ledger, Mister…’

  ‘Sariel, that’s what the stars call me.’