40.

17^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE GRAND LIBRARY, KYO-TOKAI, NIPPON

Madame Miyako Kurowa dismissed her two Under-Artificers, her Third Literate secretary, and even the Fabricated ravens awaiting messages from her offices. She meant to give Umiko Haroda her full attention.

Umiko sat in seiza at Kurowa’s tea table.

“An attack on our premises. By a lanyani?” Kurowa purred. “Please elaborate.”

Umiko stared down at her lap, twisting the hem of her kimono between nervous fingers. “I don’t know why the lanyani attacked, or where it even came from. It wasn’t like the barge pilots.”

“It came after both of you?”

“Not exactly. I think . . . it’s all a little confused. I think it was trying to kill Rowena. It didn’t notice me at all until I threw something at it.”

Kurowa nodded. “Why,” she wondered, “were you meeting her there in the first place, with one of our messenger Fabricated?”

The girl put an admirable effort toward keeping her face neutral. It was not to last. “It’s to do with Rowena’s mother. But that’s not why Rowena wanted the Fabricated in the first place. They’re taking the Amanuenses away and, I think, having copies made of parts. Having them translated. They mean to bring them back.”

Kurowa’s eyes narrowed. “Of course they do.”

The girl flinched as if she’d been struck. Good. Given the rest she had confessed—sneaking off to take the Downshire girl to the Aggregator room, airing the Bishop’s research readouts—she had much to fear from Kurowa. There was no need for her to know her crimes had only been what the First Literate had allowed to happen.

Entrapment was a slow game, but its payout, Kurowa had learned, was most generous.

“I suppose you consider this girl a friend,” she said. There was no hint of musing in her voice. It carved in a brutal, unanesthetized surgery.

Umiko nodded.

“A pity she would use you this way.”

“It wasn’t until she wanted the Fabricated and the translations that I worried over that. But even then . . .”

Kurowa poured the tea, passing Umiko a cup. The girl took it in both hands. She waited until after Kurowa drank to refresh herself.

“It’s not the stealing that bothered me, or using the Fabricated. After last night . . . it’s them.”

Madame Kurowa raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“The old man did something in my head, trying to make me forget what happened. I know that sounds mad, but it’s true. I knew they had secrets, Madame. But it keeps getting worse and worse. They think Bishop Meteron wants to do something mad with the Nine—gather them up, or use them in some experiment of his own. It doesn’t make sense. Rowena claims Madame Curator demanded Master Meteron do something for her before they could see the Amanuensis library, something so terrible, he wouldn’t tell Rowena what it was.”

Kurowa shrugged. “She commanded Master Meteron to kill Scholar Cyddra.”

Umiko’s eyes went wide as flywheels.

“That can’t be.”

“Umiko,” said Kurowa, “I have punished you in the past for over-stepping your duties, delving into things you were not meant to know or do. And yet, I have turned a blind eye to your stubborn disobedience. Did you not think I could tell by how little you accomplished in the Indexer room, and how frequently the Aggregator ran the same reports over and over again, that you were slipping away every chance you had?”

The girl’s face burned with shame. “I didn’t.” To her credit, her voice did not quaver.

A brave girl. Dutiful, in her way. Kurowa did like her. She hoped to make use of her, one last time.

“Following the Creator’s wisdom sometimes requires what seems like rash action. Scholar Cyddra suggested a heresy to the Curator and wished to publish it to the world. We have a duty to keep and curate truth—and to keep closest the truths that would do humanity harm. Do you understand?”

Umiko nodded again. “I think so.”

“Passing the Amanuensis on to an unknown translator, for an unknown purpose, puts those secret truths at risk. We gave Chalmers and his people leave to read the texts because it would keep them close, and asked for their help in ending a threat to those texts. It was a test of their intentions. Clearly, they have failed. Their presence has even brought new dangers to our very door.”

“And now?”

“Now we must change how we protect the truths that form our future. Thank you for coming to me, Umiko.”

The girl rose, bowed, and backed toward the chamber door. She paused with one hand upon its crane-shaped handle.

“Rowena won’t be harmed?”

Kurowa frowned.

“That depends on what she chooses. I hope she is as clever as you seem to think her, Third Literate.”

Clearly unhappy with that response, Umiko bowed away. Kurowa watched her shadow disappear through the parchment wall, trailing down the hallway glowing pale green in the light of draping spider vines.

Madame Kurowa rose, dusted at the hems of her kimono, and walked to her rolltop writing desk. She pulled the sequence of smaller drawers that unlatched the broad, center drawer under the blotter and drew out a sheaf of papers and an ink brush.

Kurowa’s office never boasted much in the way of natural light. Though it was only past breakfast, she paused to prune the glowplants hanging here and there, adjusting the light to suit the message she must write.

Kurowa had been a child when the first EC researchers bred the glowplants—could hardly remember what it was to walk into a Nipponese home and smell lamp oil or see an alchemist’s globe suspended in a hurricane glass. The plants brought an end to whole city blocks going up in flames, wood and oilpaper homes burning like brands. Only the oldest structures of the old Shogunate and the Grand Library were built to survive such disasters. So much the EC had given her people. So much it had taken.

Kurowa’s eyes narrowed at the thought.

Nora Pierce. She had come to the Grand Library years ago with a writ from the Council Bishopric and orders to research the oldest corners of the archives. No one thought to ask why a physicist would have been sent to do the work of an historian. The writ was enough, the Grand Library’s belief in its own protocol sacrosanct.

When three months’ searching brought the woman to the portion of the archive that contained the Amanuenses, it was too late to play at the place being meaningless, some old storage room left out of the public catalog. Pierce had insinuated herself into the Curator’s trust, and whatever the old woman was willing to permit, the Library’s servants were bound to obey.

Less than a week later, Pierce was gone, and the living book—the Amanuensis in progress—was removed from its proper home. Kurowa herself had written a letter of protest to the Council Bishopric, but received only one response, from Bishop Professor Allister Meteron.

Reverend Doctor Pierce, Meteron’s letter explained, had been completing research on his behalf that his age and health did not permit him to travel for. She’d had very specific instructions—had been chosen by the Bishop personally for her particular aptitude in the subfield crucial to his work. Was it possible that the good Literates and Artificers of the Grand Library had conflated his agent’s sudden departure with a theft that could well have happened at an earlier time? How often was the room in question actually visited by the staff at large, and were there not other scholars known to reference its contents? Had the Curator herself even been to that room in recent memory, given the state of her health?

It was a brilliant piece of scrivening, that letter. Within three days of its receipt, the Library’s Literates were nodding in solemn agreement. Yes, it had been a very long time since the Curator’s health had permitted her to study the Amanuenses. “Study” was a generous word, for where the Amanuensis collection was concerned, the Curator maintained that these books were present only for their historical value. Only the bothersome Tsuneteva clan, entitled by their wealth and patronage, dabbled in their actual contents, and never in a manner anyone had taken seriously. At least, not until much later.

Within a week, the Grand Library’s denizens had all but convinced themselves they had drawn an unfair connection between Nora Pierce and the missing book. They sent out staff to inquire after rare book agents, arts dealers, visitors from recent decades, scholars of a time when less complete records of the Library’s clientele were kept, and polled these, looking for signs of their lost text. All thought of Pierce’s disappearance had fallen away, a perfect, amnesiac spell.

Or it had, until a handful of years after the disappearance, the Decadal Conference program was featured in the gazettes, translated by linguistic algorithms applied to galvano-gram transmissions. God Is With Us, the keynote address was to be called, given by Nora Pierce and some jumped-up physicist dabbling in meteorology.

Kurowa fingered a glowplant blossom as it flexed slowly open, its delicate petals waving like the lashes of a coquettish eye. She returned to her desk and surveyed the documents beside the blank paper, a skeletal understanding of the case drawn in retrospect.

The Council Bishopric had sent Pierce. Pierce was the wrong sort of person for the job—a job she pursued like a woman literally pursued. And when she disappeared, and the book, too, only Bishop Meteron responded to Kurowa’s protest. In all likelihood, the missive from the Council Bishopric had been his work from the start.

He had wanted the book. He had nearly gotten it—nearly, Kurowa knew, because he would not have taken such eager advantage of the newly minted Aggregator in the last few years had he finally had the book in hand. Too much work gathering information, sorting for clues. It was not the work one needed to do if one already had the raw data.

A single document written in Kurowa’s hand sat beside the list of direct and circumstantial evidence. It was the lever she must use to crack the Bishop open: a single page of hard-won facts and conjectures.

A converted Hasid (or Tzadikim?)

Daughter, deceased; son, estranged (in Corma, a dissolute); granddaughter—current disposition unclear.

The rest of the record comprised key votes in EC chamber politics. Governors across the globe who fell under his influence. Revolutions in EC teachings whose genesis lay in his work. Toward the bottom, Kurowa spied the gem in her hoard: a notation about a criminal case in Rimmerston, better than twenty years old. An accustion of rape, the villain some Coal War army deserter. His departure had coincided with a prisoner of war camp being inexplicably liberated of its Vraskan captives. The accused rapist had been sentenced to hang, and yet the case was overturned by the supposedly violated woman’s own testimony. He was, she swore under the book and scales, her lawful husband, wed abroad, in a match roundly disapproved of by her father. The conviction was expunged. The records were void of any finer details, including the accused’s full name, which lingered only as initials in the previously sealed court records: Defendant E.P.

Madame Kurowa did not believe in coincidences. She believed in evidence. Her evidence lined up quite nicely now: signs of the Bishop’s search for the lost book; a suggestion of Erasmus Pardon’s entanglement in His Grace’s affairs, and an old grudge between them; evidence of Pardon and the younger Meteron’s pursuit of the Bishop; evidence of their willingness to do unlawful things—never mind the Curator’s urging, which was immaterial to the point; and further proof they were disseminating the information of the Amanuensis library without the Curator’s express leave. All of these things, compounded with Umiko’s claims of Pardon commanding unnatural influence over others’ minds, meant there was more than enough information to act on.

She wondered what Bishop Meteron would give in exchange for Erasmus Pardon.

There was only one way to find out.

Your Most Esteemed Grace,

She began the letter.

Yes. That would do nicely.