34.

11^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE AMANUENSIS LIBRARY, KYO-TOKAI, NIPPON

A key in a lock, a turn, and the door opened.

Though the rest of his party were all too ready to cross the threshold into the Grand Library’s long-withheld Amanuensis collection, the Alchemist stood to the side to consider the space and let others pass. Madame Kurowa swept a hand over the chamber, not with the élan of a cabaret maestra unveiling a prized performer, but as a monarch introducing a favored subject. The ovoid chamber’s three levels rose upward, bathed in sunlight from the peaked confection of glass and brass adorning the ceiling above. Anselm strode in, hands folded behind his back, looking unapologetically smug. Phillip Chalmers nearly bowled Rowena over, and then retreated a step, mastering his eagerness long enough to remember to be a gentleman and let her pass. The girl rewarded his gallantry with a confused stare and a shrug, which the Reverend Doctor’s durable obliviousness permitted him to survive without embarrassment. Comfortable at the rear, the Alchemist came through last, only half-listening to Madame Kurowa’s instructions to Chalmers.

His mind was, as it had been for the last several days, deeply divided. “. . . freedom of entry day or night. We have lifted the hall guards for the remainder of your stay and installed a lock on the door with a key only your party possesses,” Kurowa explained as she watched the visitors walk the center space and its glass-shielded cabinets of identical-seeming texts.

“Our party and you,” Anselm noted.

She smiled. There was nothing pleasant in the expression. “Your party and I, yes, Master Meteron. The lift access code will be changed to a sequence of your choosing. That, too, will be shared with me. For the sake of the collection’s well-being, you understand.”

Books, Rare called from a corner, where her phantom self perched sidesaddle on a long cabinet, don’t have well-being.

It was precisely the kind of petty side-commentary Erasmus had been working to filter out—the kind that, if Rare pushed hard enough, he was in real danger of responding to aloud.

But the comment did provoke a question. “It seems strange to put a skylight in a room of books you are eager to preserve against damage,” he said.

Kurowa nodded. “This was once the private meditation chamber of the monastic order that constructed this building, ages ago—long before the Library became a part of the Protectorate. It was sufficiently remote from the rest of the complex to suit the Amanuensis collection’s . . . necessary exclusivity. The glass is treated to filter out the wavelengths of light that do the worst damage to the books. Ultimately, natural light still poses less of a risk of destruction than gas lamps, arc lamps, or even bioluminescent plants, which can molder over time.”

She likes that you asked that, Rare observed. Was that the point of asking?

The point of asking, Erasmus thought back, was determining how unusual the glass is, should we find ourselves needing to breach it.

Ann must be so proud of you, thinking of the next sideline.

I’m sure he’s thought of that already. “We ask that you handle the texts with the archive kits provided,” Kurowa continued. She opened a low cabinet near the entrance where prepared trays of magnifying glasses, book props, lead weights, and pencils waited. “Leave anything you’ve used on top of this sideboard. It will be properly cleaned and treated before the next day.”

Kurowa said her goodbyes, leaving the four companions—or the four that could see one another—alone in the strange, layered room.

Rowena peeked out from behind a long, glass bookcase, smiling mischief at Anselm. “Race you to the top?”

Ann’s answer was to wink and bolt around the bookcase, peeling for the nearest set of stairs.

“Not fair!” Rowena wailed. “You didn’t say ‘go’ you cheat, you arse, come back!”

Rare watched the girl disappear up the staircase, leaping the steps two at a time. Her features creased unhappily. Then she looked toward Chalmers, who was already pulling an archive kit and bringing it back to a shelf on the main floor.

Erasmus stood just behind Chalmers as he carefully selected a book— one of the last in the sequence whose spines were marked with arcane notations likely indicating dates. Chalmers glanced at him, gesturing to the volume, as if to say, “After you?”

“Carry on,” Erasmus said.

Chalmers opened the book and stared down at the page. The Reverend Doctor’s brow creased. Rare’s revenant passed her father a skeptical look. He shook his head, very slightly. Not now.

“Do you believe it’s true?” Chalmers blurted. He froze, looking up at the top tier of the chamber, where Rowena seemed to have just beaten Anselm to the final step, based on her unladylike gloating. He continued, more quietly. “That all of this is written in the lanyani’s language, I mean?”

Erasmus donned his spectacles. He considered the blocky, serif-heavy shapes crowding the page. “Why would you rather it was not?”

“I never said that!” The young man paused, as if suddenly remembering to whom he spoke. He grimanced. “Very well. I would rather it were not true.”

The Alchemist waited.

Rare smiled. You know, I always hated when you did this ‘patience while the student teaches themself ’ thing to me, but it’s really quite delightful to watch with this idiot. I’ve seen kinotrope shows with less drama.

Hush, the Alchemist replied. “I’m not sure what the worst part is,” Chalmers admitted. “The fact that, if this is true, it confirms our denial of the lanyani’s civility as specious nonsense. Or that it renders the years I spent working what I thought was a cipher into an embarrassing waste of time. Or . . .” He looked to Erasmus uncertainly, as if hoping to read in the older man’s features an understanding of what he was unwilling to say aloud.

“Or that it calls into question the actual purpose of this Grand Experiment,” Erasmus completed.

Rare peered at the topmost balcony, the rise and fall of Anselm and Rowena’s voices in conversation plainly audible. Or who it’s really about, she added.

“Do you always try to trip people in the last leg of a race?” Master Meteron demanded, scowling at Rowena as she paced up and down the long rows of books lining the walls of the third balcony.

“If I want to win, sure.”

Rowena ran her fingertips along the glass, counting bookcases under her breath. The shelves curved like the ribs of some great beast. She puzzled over the books’ curious spines. She had seen sets of books in identical binding before. The Stone Scales boasted more than a few encyclopedias, and she’d seen bookshop windows with dainty sets of research diaries and philosophical arguments by Lucan or Dideraut or Chatter-jee-Bhalla. But Rowena Downshire had never seen whole shelves—no, a whole library within a library—with books so identical in every respect. Each was bright red, with a seal on the spine featuring the Ecclesiastical Commission’s insignia, and a range of numbers that meant nothing to her. More than that, the books were the same height, the same thickness, even the same in their degree of dusty disuse.

“These are . . . weird,” she decided.

Meteron plucked a tome from the shelf. After a moment, he slid it back and continued pacing after her. “Looks like these each cover a period of a few years, based on the dates.”

“You can read the dates?”

“They’re from the old calendar, before the Unity. We started counting over from zero after the Ecclesiastical Commission formed.”

“So, it’s 277 in the EC calendar.”

“And 1794 in the old calendar,” Master Meteron finished.

Rowena walked down the curve of another aisle, calling over her shoulder, “How far back d’you suppose the record goes?”

“If the books average, say, five years apiece, and each of these cabinets holds around fifty volumes—”

Rowena paused in rolling aside a glass panel. “Wait. That’s—that’s hundreds and hundreds of years. Way before the Unity. Way before the EC.”

“This used to be a monastery, in the old days.”

Rowena frowned. “Kneeler?”

“Not in the sense you mean. Anti-attachment pagans. Naturalists. Meditation masters.”

“But they were still keeping records.”

“Seems that way.” Meteron opened the cabinet Rowena had stepped away from and brushed a thumb over the seal on a book’s spine. “These could have been added at any time. Easy enough to standardize the collection after the fact.”

“So, now that we know how far back this really goes . . . what do we actually know?”

“We know more about what we need to know.”

“I don’t follow.”

Meteron peered up and down the row of shelving, gestured to the curve where it passed out of clear view. “The math doesn’t add up, even if one takes the old monastic orders into consideration. There are thousands of years recorded here. Bear ever told you how long mankind has kept written records?”

“No.”

“A really fucking long time. And this lot—the Grand Library, and the EC, and the monastics before them—haven’t been organized long enough to account for all of it. These texts came from somewhere else first.”

Rowena followed him down the aisle, then paused as he followed the bend toward the opposite side of the balcony, wrapping behind another wall of shelving.

1794, he’d said.

Rowena scanned the spines nearest by. The oldest volumes must be kept at the top of the chamber, based on these dates. One stared at her through the glass, its dulled numbers barely legible: 11m380–2m384. The m’s, she decided, were likely markers of months, which meant the short number after was a year. She had to work at remembering that if what Anselm had said was true, these weren’t dates for the future, but of the distant past.

The rogue had wound away some distance, finally stopping centuries away. She walked after him, scanning the shelves, and noticed one book in particular had grabbed his attention. Xm519–Xm521 (*), it read.

He opened the glass, pulled the volume, and turned it over in his hands.

“What’s the little star about, d’you suppose?” Rowena asked. “An asterisk.”

“A what?”

“That’s what it’s called. Notates some exception or detail peculiar to this volume. Most of the volumes in this block seem to have it. The month notation is an X, which suggests—” he shrugged.

“The date’s just a guess?” Rowena finished. “Likely. Notice anything else?”

Meteron turned to a page at random. Rowena had seen the active book—the active Amanuensis, she guessed she should call it—back in the Old Cathedral’s bowels, even watched some of the text swimming to the surface of its pages. At first, she thought it was just the stillness of the blocky, serif-heavy markings Chalmers had called “Enochian” that seemed strange. But then, she looked closer and noticed some shapes, totally meaningless to her, but familiar for their frequency, and they were

. . . wrong. Or—no. Not wrong, but— “The writing isn’t shaped the same as the others,” she announced. “This is a copy.”

Meteron nodded. “So it seems, cricket. These ancient volumes came from somewhere else, from some other medium, and were transferred here.”

“And then, sometime or other, the library must have had an active book here at the same time as a blank text when the old book filled up, and then—boom.”

“Boom,” Meteron murmured.

Rowena studied his cagey face, frowning. “You say there’s somebody who can translate these for us, fast?”

“Faster than Chalmers fooling with ciphers.”

“I suppose,” she continued, “it’s too much to hope you can, y’know, just bring them up here to have a look-see?”

“From what I’ve pieced together, it’s their having come here and had a look-see before that makes it impossible now.”

“So how’re we going to get the information we need out of these books?”

“Simple, cricket. We’ll make our own copies.”

“How?”

Meteron smiled wickedly. “I thought you’d never ask.”