Mountain of Black Glass

by Tad Williams

  "Something familiar, but I cannot be sure—it was fleeting. There are so many people here that I am finding it hard to process the information."

  Renie lowered her voice, leaning toward Martine's ear. "Do you think it was . . . you know who?"

  Martine shrugged.

  The company was beginning to spread a little in response to the Brownian movement of the wide, crowded corridor. Just to be on the safe side, Renie and Florimel pulled the companions back together. The crush was abetted by people entering from side channels, some pulling wagons piled high with goods, many the apparent product of extensive poaching: Renie doubted that people in this squatter society would be building ornate candelabra from scratch, and even if they were, she somehow doubted it would be someone as shifty-eyed and dirty-fingered as the man she was currently watching.

  Almost without realizing it, they reached their destination. The corridor widened so abruptly that the walls simply seemed to have disappeared, and the ceiling retreated to a point that must have been far higher than the top rung of the ladder Renie had climbed earlier. The space they found themselves in was as large as four of the huge upstairs ballrooms put together, and as crowded with people as any of the hallway-streets outside. But it was the bookshelves that were truly impressive.

  Shelves lined the Library from floor level all the way to the ceiling, dozens and dozens of shelves mounting upward until, like an art-class perspective exercise, they seemed to have no space left between them. Every single one was jammed from one side to another with books, so that the walls of the vast room had become abstract mosaics tiled in multicolored leather book spines. Enormously long ladders stood in some places, stretching many meters from the floor up the vertical facing of the book-cliffs; other, smaller versions dangled between one row of higher shelves and another, perhaps simplifying the journeys of scholars or clerks who had to move back and forth between the same spots many times. But in some spots along the immense shelves the only way to get to certain locations appeared to be along frighteningly crude rope bridges, one strand for the feet, the other chest high, the long, sagging cables rooted on platforms built in the room's corners. It was not the only use of rope: from the floor to a height of perhaps two stories the shelves were protected from theft and depredation by nets of knotted silk, so that the books could be seen but not touched or removed. The steep vertical shelves were acrawl with people in gray robes—the Library-tending monks Zekiel had mentioned. Quietly purposeful as bees on a honeycomb, these dark-robed figures repaired the book net where a cord had frayed or a knot had been cut, or moved carefully along the upper walkways. At least two dozen leaned out from ladders at various points along the shelves, wielding long-handled dusters. Both the monks and the Market-going throng appeared largely oblivious to each other.

  "It is amazing," Florimel said. "I cannot guess how many books are here."

  "I believe seven million, three hundred four thousand and ninety-three is the most recent total," said an unfamiliar voice. "But most of those are stored in the lower catacombs. I doubt there are a fifth that many in this room."

  The smiling man who stood beside them was young, plump, and bald. As he turned to gaze fondly at the shelves, Renie saw that all his hair except a single broad tuft on the back of his skull had been shaved. His gray robe and odd coiffure left little doubt of his profession.

  "You're one of the monks?" Renie asked.

  "Brother Epistulus Tertius," he replied. "This is your first time at the Market?"

  "It is."

  He nodded, looking them over, but she could see neither calculation nor suspicion in his open, pinkish face. "May I tell you something of its history, our Library? I am afraid I am very proud of it—I still cannot get over the idea that a boy like me from the Stovewood Scavengers should have come to such a wonderful place." He spotted !Xabbu and suddenly looked worried. "Or am I keeping you from your marketing?"

  Renie wondered if he thought they were looking for a buyer for the baboon. She examined the monk carefully, trying to see whether the face of the thing that had pretended to be Quan Li might be hiding behind the benevolent exterior, but she could think of no reason why their enemy should bother to change his appearance if he had remained, nor could she find any evidence that this man was more than he seemed. Certainly, a friendly insider was the best thing to find in any unfamiliar place. "That's very kind," she said aloud. "We would love to learn more."

  ". . . And here are the greatest treasures of all." Brother Epistulus Tertius gestured reverently. "These are the books which our Order has translated. The wisdom of the ancients!"

  In the context of the hundreds upon thousands of books ranged above them, tended by scores of gray-robed brothers, it seemed like the punchline to a joke. The crystal reliquary on the table before them contained scarcely two dozen volumes. One had been opened, as if for display. In beautifully-drawn letters, almost lost among the profusion of illuminations around capitals and in the margins, she could read the words, ". . . particular Care must be taken not to perforate the Liver during cleaning, or the flavours of the Bird will be spoyled. Seasonings, such as Shrew-Wort and autumn Carpet Buttons, may be Employed, but must be Added with a Cautious Hand. . . ."

  "It's a recipe," Renie said. The Market crowd jostled past, kept from bumping the holy relics themselves only by a low wooden fence set directly in the carpeted floor. Engaged in haggling and gossip, none of them seemed particularly intent on leaping over the barrier to snag the holy cookbook.

  "Perhaps, perhaps!" Their guide was cheerful. "There is so much we have left to discover. Now that we have learned the alphabet of the Solarium People, there are surely two or even three more volumes that will yield up their secrets."

  "Do you mean that all of these books," Florimel waved her hand at the looming shelves, "are in unknown languages?"

  "Certainly." The monk's smile did not lessen. "Oh, they were clever, the ancients! And so many of the languages are completely forgotten. And then there are codes—so many codes, some of them uniquely clever, some quite senseless and mad. And even though many of the codes are doubtless quite comprehensible, they are tied to other books which are somewhere in the Library—but of course we cannot know which books, because we do not understand the code in the first place." He shrugged, happy possessor of a job for life.

  Florimel said, "That is very interesting, Brother Epistulus, but. . . ."

  "Please, I am only Epistulus Tertius—my master, God willing, will live many years more, and then there is yet another before me in line to shoulder his great burden."

  ". . . But can you tell us anything about the house itself? What is beyond it?"

  "Ah, you will want to talk to one of my brethren with a greater specialty in matters philosophical," he said. "But first, I would like to show you my own specialty. . . ."

  "Op this!" called T4b, an unfamiliar tone in his voice. Renie turned to see him crouching on the floor a short distance away, surrounded by children. One of them had tugged back the sleeve of T4b's robe and discovered his gleaming hand; the teenager was cheerfully pretending to grab them, keeping the children squealing in excitement and mock fear. He looked so happy that although Renie did not like him attracting attention, she was reluctant to say anything. Emily stood behind him, watching the game, her narrow face lost in thought. Martine was closer to Renie than to Emily, T4b, and the children, but seemed even less connected to the group, head bowed, her mouth working silently, her eyes staring down at nothing. Renie wanted to go to her and see if she was all right—the blind woman seemed to be having a reaction like that which had first gripped her on their entry into the Otherland network—but !Xabbu was touching Renie's arm, silently asking for attention, and the monk was trying to get them all to follow him toward other treasures.

  ". . . And of course we are no farther in dealing with these missives than we are with the books themselves," Epistulus Tertius was saying to Florimel, "but we have had a breakthrough lately on the datal notations on som
e of the Far Eastern Porch Civilization lists. . . ."

  A movement above her drew Renie's gaze. Several of the dusting monks were leaning out from the shelves above, eavesdropping on their brother's words and examining the newcomers. Like Epistulus Tertius they all had shaven heads, but in all other ways seemed a different species altogether, a younger, smaller, and livelier group, doubtless due to the demands of their task. They clung to the treacherous ropes seemingly without fear, and moved with the certainty of squirrels. Several of them wore the cowled necks of their robes over their mouths and noses as protection against dust, leaving only their eyes and the dome of their heads visible. One young man near the end was observing the newcomers particularly intently, and for a moment Renie almost felt she recognized him, but even as she watched he seemed to grow bored, and shinnied back up onto a higher shelf and out of sight.

  Brother Epistulus Tertius was insistent, and after a few minutes they found themselves being led through the milling crowds toward the vault where the researching of antique correspondence was carried out. The monk talked in a nonstop rush of facts about the Library, most of them meaningless to Renie. She found herself instead watching the various denizens of the house as they went about their business, the black-smudged Coal Scuttle Boys larking on an afternoon's holiday, the various Kitchen guilds making arrangements with the itinerant sharpeners, the jugglers and musicians that gave the whole thing the air of a Renaissance carnival. It was only as they reached a doorway out of the Market Square and into the monastery halls—a section of the endless bookshelves that swung outward to reveal a tiled hallway into which Epistulus Tertius was beckoning them—that she realized why the dusting monk looked familiar.

  If you saw a monk you assumed it was a man, but if someone shaved off black hair, and pulled a robe up until it mostly covered the face. . . .

  "It's him!" she said, almost shouting. "Oh, my God, it's him—I mean her! That monk up on the bookshelf—it was Quan Li's sim!"

  Her companions turned from Brother Epistulus Tertius, startled into a flurry of questions, but !Xabbu's was by far the most chilling.

  "Where is Martine?" he asked.

  They quickly retraced their path across the Market, but the blind woman had vanished.

  Second:

  ANGELS AND ORPHANS

  "The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?"

  —Edgar Allan Poe,

  The Premature Burial

  CHAPTER 9

  Eyes of Stone

  NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 5.5 (Eu, NAm)—"HOW TO KILL YOUR TEACHER"

  (visual: Looshus and Kantee hanging from wall in razor-lined room over vat of fire)

  VO: Looshus (Ufour Halloran) and Kantee (Brandywine Garcia) have destroyed Jang the assassin, but are trapped now by Superintendent Skullflesh (Richard Raymond Balthazar) in the Detention Dungeon. Casting 2 dungeon attendants, 4 corpses. Flak to: GCN.HOW2KL.CAST

  Detective Calliope Skouros tilted the viewing lens away from her face and sighed. The display pinched the bridge of her nose. Her head was beginning to hurt. It was time to contemplate having another drink and saying the hell with it for the night, or possibly for good.

  For the third straight evening she had spent hours of her own time using the department account to comb the vast data resources of the IPN, trying to find something that would take her another step forward on the Polly Merapanui case. She had run victim Polly's own data every which way, all the mind-numbing trivia in the original case file and every useless bit she and Stan Chan had added to it with their own investigation. She had run the Woolagaroo angle through the informational meat grinder as well, hoping against hope it had come up in someone's M.O., been used as a nickname, anything, but with no luck.

  Calliope's father had used to tell a joke, one she only dimly remembered. It had something to do with a wildly optimistic child who, when given a huge pile of horseshit as a cruel gift, had spent hours digging through it, reasoning, "There has to be a pony in here somewhere!"

  Well, that's me, she thought. And up to this point, I'm seriously short of ponies.

  Stan had a little pile of builder toys on his desk, cheap automata he had bought from a sidewalk vendor that would take any materials given them, like sand or sugar cubes or (in this instance) toothpicks, and turn them into odd little structures. His builders had gotten to a tricky point; he did not even say hello when Calliope swept into the room.

  The door slamming shut behind her knocked the tiny structure apart. He looked up grumpily as the headless bug-things began the process all over. "Jeez, Skouros, what's your problem? You look happy—that can't be good."

  "We've got it!" She dropped into her chair and slid in behind the desk like a cargo plane coming in for a landing. "Come and look!"

  Her partner made a face, but sauntered over to stand behind her shoulder. "Are we going to explain what it is we've got, or do we just wait until symptoms develop?"

  "Struggle to not be an asshole for just ten seconds, Stan. Look at this. I've been trying to get some kind of hit on 'Woolagaroo' for days, without luck. But it's the damn department search that's been locking me up!" She brushed her hand across the screen and a flurry of print danced behind, as though following her fingers.

  "The search?"

  "The gear, Stan, the gear! It doesn't do automatic phonetic matches—this stuff is from the Stone Age, I swear. I searched 'Woolagaroo,' and all I got back was hundreds of last names and town names with similar spellings, none of them right, and none of them anything to do with our case as far as I could see. But then I started wondering whether the searcher they make us use was as old and useless as everything else around here, and I put in a few soundalike variants of my own, figuring it might be in there but spelled wrong—that it had gone in originally as hearsay, or been misspelled by the arresting officer. Hell, I didn't know how to spell it properly until I got those articles from Professor Jigalong."

  "You're taking an even longer time than usual to get to the point, Skouros." But she had him, she knew; Stan was trying hard to sound casual.

  "So I threw in a bunch of variants—'Woolagaru,' 'Wullagaroo,' see? Like that. And look what came back."

  "Wulgaru, John—aka 'Johnny,' 'Johnny Dark,' 'John Dread,' " he read aloud. "Okay, so you've found someone with an extensive juvenile record. Nasty little bastard, from the looks of him. But he's got no arrests in years—which, with his quick start in life, means he's probably dead. And that last known address is ridiculously old, too."

  "Yes! And he fell off the map less than a year before Polly Merapanui was killed. The same year!" She couldn't believe he was trying so hard not to see it. Calliope felt a moment of worry—had she been after this too long? But in her heart she knew better.

  "So you've got a similarity between this guy's name and something that Reverend What's-his-name's wife said about an Aboriginal fairy tale, and the guy disappeared, or at least stopped getting arrested under that name, within a few months of our murder." He pushed his glasses up his nose—like many other things about him, his look was decidedly old-fashioned. "Thin, Skouros. Real thin."

  "Well, my doubting friend, how thin is this?" She waved her fingers and another window full of text drifted up like a carp rising to the surface of a pond. "Our young friend Wulgaru did time in the Feverbrook Hospital juvenile facility when he was seventeen, on the violent ward—'threat to himself and others' is the official catchall."

  "So?"

  "So did you actually read our case file? Polly Merapanui was there at the same time, a brief stay after a half-hearted suicide attempt."

  Stan was silent for a long moment. "Damn," he said at last.

  Her partner was unusually reserved on the drive out to Windsor, but he did point out that it would have been faster just getting the records sent to the office. "It's not like either of them are still living there, Skouros."

  "I know. But I'm different than you,
Stan. I need to go there, have a look at the place. Get a feeling for it. And if you give me any 'women's intuition' bullshit, you can walk back. This is my car."

  "Touchy." His eyebrows rose briefly. Stan Chan was so deadpan that he made Calliope feel like some kind of circus freak—The Incredible Sweating, Shouting Woman. But he was a solid bloke, and his strengths meshed well with hers. Good Cop/Bad Cop was less important in most investigations than Excited Cop/Cautious Cop, and even though she occasionally got tired of playing her role—it would be nice to be the cool and collected one, just for once—she couldn't imagine working better with anyone else.

  From the name, she had half-expected Feverbrook Hospital to be some castle monstrosity of turrets and cupolas, the kind of building best viewed under the lowering clouds of an electrical storm; instead, while it was indeed a remnant of an earlier architectural style, that style was from the earlier part of Calliope's own century, a look she tended to think of as "Strip-Mall Whimsical." The buildings were scattered about the grounds like a child's collection of blocks, except where they were piled high and awkwardly at the center of the complex to form what must be the administration buildings; most were painted in cheerful pastels, with ornamentation in bold primary colors—railings and awnings and annoying little decorations that served no obvious purpose. The effect was of something designed first to lure, then soothe and delight, the slow-witted. Calliope wondered how intentional that had been.

  The hospital director, Dr. Theodosia Hazen, was a slim, tall, middle-aged woman whose graciousness seemed as practiced as yoga. She glided out of her office as soon as the detectives were announced, a smile of noblesse oblige tilting the corners of her mouth.

  "Of course, we are happy to help," she said, as though Calliope or Stan had just asked. "I've had my assistant pull the records for you—we could have sent them!" She laughed at the silliness of it, as though the detectives had told a slightly naughty joke.