48.

19^TH EIGHTMONTH, 277 A.U.

THE GRAND LIBRARY, KYO-TOKAI, NIPPON

Madame Kurowa set down the report on the writing desk. The Curator lay on her divan, bundled against a chill the younger woman could not feel. The day had passed very quickly, the sun already ebbing toward the horizon. Exhaustion, perhaps. She was very old for the sort of dramas that day had furnished.

“Is there anything else you wish for me to add, senpai?”

The Curator’s white hair was coppered by the setting sun. “No,” she murmured. “It is a good report. Very thorough. And now, you must take what His Grace has offered you.”

Kurowa’s hands stalled in the midst of winding the report to fit in a message cylinder. “It is . . . not a request I am eager to fulfill.”

The ancient woman responded with a snort which dissolved at once into wet hacking. “You have been eager to take my place since you were a child, Miyako-chan. Three generations of First Literates before you hung their every breath from that hope. And now you spurn it? Aie, children. You are such fickle creatures.”

Kurowa put the message in the vacuum chute installed behind a bronze stamping of a crane and carp. Its cylinder disappeared with a gasp of air, whisked off into the bowels of the building.

“Grandmother, it is true I asked Bishop Meteron to see that I would succeed you in exchange for delivering him the Cormarrans. But I had thought, given a little time—”

“The Bishop and I had an arrangement, my child,” the old woman interrupted. She struggled to right herself on the divan, finally managing a propped position. “I honor my agreements. It is the way it must be, when one speaks for the whole of the Library. Here.” She patted the cushion with a gnarled hand, nodding toward the floor. “Come.”

Kurowa knelt at her grandmother’s side. “Research,” the Curator said, stroking a lock of Kurowa’s hair, “is a very different matter than collecting or curating. We have held the Amanuenses safe against time and treachery, until the very recent past.”

“I know. It gives me shame to broker with the man who stole—”

“Stole?” The Curator’s wizened eyes blinked, looking for a moment altogether lost. “Oh, no, my child. Nora Pierce took the book, it is true. But she took it with my blessing, even if the Literates who served me did not know it. She took it in Allister Meteron’s name, for a most sacred purpose. It was that purpose she stole, not the book.”

Kurowa stared. “What do you mean?”

“I am one hundred and eleven years old, Miyako-chan. I have lived long enough to see how much the world can change, and to be frustrated at what little good its changes bring. We have held these books for time uncounted—carved the first of them from the boles of trees that bore words we had never seen before, words that wrote themselves on and on, in defiance of all Reason. We held them knowing they were of great moment, but without understanding their purpose. It was Scholar Cyddra’s work that helped me see my own part in this drama. One hundred years, a subject of the experiment, and yet there I was, ignorant and undriven. What good had I done mankind, heedless of my purpose in the Creator’s eyes? I knew the Scholar’s skills as a translator would only grow. And I knew holding the books here forever would only maintain the status quo. If the Creator has made us to shape the world with His wisdom and insight, should we not have it in our hands?”

The Curator’s bloodless lips twisted in something that, on a younger face, would have more plainly been a smile.

“Bishop Meteron was an older man and a wiser one when I asked him about the Grand Experiment again, all those years ago. He had learned something from his youthful arrogance at the Decadal Conference of Aerion. It had bought him notoriety and power, yet still no closer to the truth he sought. I offered him the chance to hold the truth, and its future.”

Kurowa sucked in a shocked breath. “You offered to give him the book. So he could begin the library anew.”

“In a more public place, yes. We agreed that he should continue the library, and that when it was established, we would . . . test how the Vautnek status transmits. Poor Doctor Pierce. She must not have been told what to expect in that package. Perhaps, she had been forbidden to open it. We had never before made the active text accessible, apart from indulging the Tsunetevas. When she realized what she held, she fled. Perhaps she feared it would be used for ill. Not an unworthy fear. It speaks well of her intentions.”

“Why did Meteron let her keep it so long? Surely he could have sent agents after her, taken the book back?”

“Perhaps he could have. But he knew nothing of Scholar Cyddra’s translations. In fairness, I did not myself appreciate the connection between their obsession with the lanyani and their facility with the ancient books. I did not offer Bishop Meteron any help making sense of the book. I trusted he would find his own method. Perhaps that brilliant, arrogant son of his could be brought back to the fold, coaxed into working the cipher. Anselm Meteron was always very skilled with patterns. A musician by training, you know.” She chuckled at Kurowa’s evident distaste. “Not a field much respected in the seminaries, but it was the only course he had the discipline to see through. There is, at least, a lot of mathematics in composition. When His Grace learned Pierce was making progress deciphering the text, he made the only reasonable decision.”

Kurowa nodded. “To let her do the work for him. And then the Conference happened.”

“Yes.” The Curator gazed out the window, sighing. A wind coiled up in the courtyard below, sending cherry blossoms in flurries like snow before they settled between benches and statues, bathed in the fading sun. “Everything spun out of his control. The book, lost. His translator, dead. But part of our agreement can still be kept. The part you must do, to take my place.”

“I won’t.”

“The Curator’s successor must be endorsed by at least three members of the Logicians’ Council. Meteron is, ostensibly, retired.” The Curator smirked. “That seems in vogue in his family, doesn’t it? Nominal retirement. But he wields great influence among his peers. He need only ask, and the whole of the Council will place their seals upon your name. But nothing comes from nothing, Miyako-chan. You know this.”

Kurowa bowed her head. Why had words abandoned her? How could she have been so sure of her future, so certain she’d held all the trumps, just days before? Hours before, even.

“And Meteron has a means of . . . watching,” she murmured. “Despite the loss of the active book?”

“He swore to it in his letter. Allister Meteron is many things, but he would not seek harm without the promise of benefit.”

“And you are . . .” Kurowa began.

“I am,” her grandmother answered, “one hundred and eleven years old.”

With that, the Curator said no more, lowering herself with painful care, lying with hands crossed upon her sunken chest. She closed her eyes. Kurowa watched the sun disappear and the glowplants come to life, their long, ivy trains wound among the bare wooden rafters.

Kurowa stood and took a cushion embroidered in gold and red from beneath the old woman’s tiny feet. She lowered them gently, tucking a blanket over them.

The Curator’s face settled. Unknotted. She was almost asleep, the weariness of her last, long day rising out of her bones like steam. The First Literate studied her, committing every crease of the old woman to memory, tracing the lines of her face with stinging eyes.

She bent forward as Miyako Kurowa, First Literate of the Grand Library of Nippon, and pressed the cushion to her grandmother’s face.

Two minutes later, she straightened and stood framed in the night-darkened window, the Tower of Water rising in the distance: First Curator, the Grand Librarian, the Keeper of Reason, until the Creator claimed her.

Clara Downshire was not a strong reader, but she knew her maps and had a good memory, though it was always a little jumbled. The Bishop had given her so many things to study, those last two days. So much to remember. Ambrotype pictures from indices of members of the Ecclesiastical Commission. Biographical notes from research extracts. Maps of a little island somewhere off Nippon, so old they were crumbling all around the edges. Her task was, put into words, very simple: to learn so much about the Grand Librarian, the First Curator, that she would see the woman in her mind’s eye as she saw everyone else, a swarm of young-old-present selves, faces merging into one another, trying to settle into a moment.

The machine, Clara had been told, was only there to help. It made her feel very funny, and it itched her scalp terribly, though that may well have been from the doctors shaving her hair.

She had wept when they did it. Her husband had always loved her hair, and even Master Meteron buried his face in it, breathing deep as he ran his lips up her throat and his hands down the laces of her bodice. But sacrifices had to be made. Somehow, knowing this ancient woman inside and out would bring her Rowie back. Clara didn’t know how, or why, but the Bishop swore on it, and mother always told Clara the bishops and the clergy were people you were meant to believe.

And so, her mind tangled up in grief for Rowena, and the memory of her lost hair, and a warm ache between her legs for a lover she sensed was already gone—already bound for his promised place, where desperate men ate one another and the hateful trees ate the bones left behind— tangled amid all of this, Clara almost missed the moment when a vision of red and gold stitching stuttered before her eyes.

The long-fingered writing machine beside her chair jumped. It drew new lines that rose and fell and peaked on a long, long paper that puddled on the floor.

Rabbit sat up from his flop across her feet, whining, and buried his muzzle between her hands.

All the air in Clara’s lungs was gone, as if she’d been punched. She rocked, tried to gasp, but her throat didn’t know how to open. Her mouth was full of cotton and her body wailed for air. She dug into Rabbit’s fur, clawing his ears. He yowled, but stayed with her, and as suddenly as the fit came, it passed.

Clara sagged, heaving, her eyes streaming.

Someone had come into the room. A jumble of voices bounded off the bare walls. Deliverance Tegura crouched beside the chair, holding Clara’s pale hand in her dark one.

Ana Cortes scampered up, pushing a map past Deacon Fredericks, who had appeared at Clara’s opposite side, proffering a glass of water.

She took it in both hands and gulped, sloshing down her chin and breasts and dress, still gasping.

“Show us where,” Ana Cortes cried, pushing the map forward again. “Where do you see her now? Where has she gone?”

Clara stared at the paper. It was the whole world, skimmed off a globe and laid out before her. She heard something—a baby’s cry. She looked around, her mother’s instinct searching for its source.

“Where?” Cortes shouted.

“Clara, please.” Tegura took Clara by the chin and pulled her face round, pointing it toward the map.

The baby’s cries were definitely . . . definitely coming from . . .

“Here,” Clara said.

She placed a trembling finger on an island east of Leonis, far below the Arabias, far from the aigamuxa that had gutted the mighty continent of its native peoples.

“Here,” she repeated.

Tegura stood, nodding toward the window Clara could not see through. It looked like a mirror. But there was someone on the other side, watching. Listening.

“Subject One location, Seychelles, 19^th Eightmonth, 277, 1900 hours,” she called. “Mark it on the record.”

Leopold Fredericks beamed down at Clara, his florid face alight with pleasure. Clara stared at him, uncomprehending. Didn’t he know his weak heart would give out before he turned fifty? The poor man. Barely a line on his face, and gone already. The smell of death swelled around him. Clara struggled not to gag.

“You’ve done it, Mrs. Downshire,” Fredericks crowed. “Proven that we can trace the transference of Vautnek status through the exact moment of death coinciding with birth. It’s a breakthrough!”

Clara nodded absently. Rabbit had wormed his way past the deacons and seminarians buzzing all around, checking the wires connected just below her scalp, injecting things into the tubes in her arms. She didn’t like the tubes, or the one running up her skirt—the unmentionable tube, which emptied her in the most convenient, humiliating way into a jar beside the long-fingered stenography machine.

The dog rested his head in her lap.

A voice—an aged version of the one she had imagined purring in her ear moments before—sounded from a vox box near the mirrored window’s frame. Clara choked back a sob.

Rabbit growled. “Thank you, Mrs. Downshire. You have been most helpful. You must be very tired.”

She nodded, though only a little. The bonnet of leads hurt so much. A tear ran down her lip, and Rabbit stood on his hind legs, lapping at her face in sympathy.

“I’ve asked Miss Cortes to prepare you a place to rest. Your duties can be taken over by our new guest, until you feel properly recovered.”

The door to the chamber opened. Two guards wearing the EC’s black and gold ushered another man in between them.

The dog barked wildly.