Xachar
By his fifth day as the assistant Presskeeper, Xachar was in love.
If one can be said to love a machine.
Whispers followed him into the Pressmen’s mess hall. He paid no mind. He’d made no friends in the barracks. He wouldn’t need any. He had the press itself. No one else had that. Not even those who’d tended the machine before him, now manning the lesser presses. They’d been broken by the Midnight Emerald, Xachar knew. But he was stronger. His mind was clearer after a workday than it had been the day before.
He felt their gazes like the sun on the back of his neck. Watched when others spread their packs across chairs so he could not sit near them. He was marked. He knew that too. With his ink-lined fingernails, he could trace any jar or menu and the words would begin to disappear. By the end of his second week, they made him wear gloves to the mess hall. And everywhere else.
The ink dust that he pulled from the press’s scuppers glowed a little, but only on the darkest nights. It was nearly impossible to wash it all off. Xachar, as he walked back to the pressroom from the mess hall that evening of no stars and no moon, gleamed like the gem at the heart of the press.
Instead of going to the barracks to sleep, he returned to the room, to the always-running press. The ink dust scuppers were full again. The gem was a dark, oily color.
“You’ve been busy,” he murmured. He didn’t expect the gem to reply, and it did not.
Down the hall, shouts erupted. Pressmen stood to see what the commotion was. Xachar stuck his head out of the room and watched as the First Leader, who had been in office for only eleven months, was clamped at the elbows and sides and carried unceremoniously from her office.
They marched past Xachar’s door. “Careful,” the leader hissed. “You’ll be next.”
More men streamed past. Xachar stopped one of them. “What did the leader do?”
“Former leader. Failure to unify knowledge, I believe.” He sounded happy. “The second captain will address the corps.” They walked out of Xachar’s line of sight, the former First Leader still struggling.
When they returned, they collected Xachar too, in the same manner.
They lifted him high, fingers bunching the fabric of his Pressmen’s blue uniform, bruising the skin beneath. They took him down a long set of stairs and into the basement, where they put him in a room alone and locked the door.
“Why do you do this?” Xachar asked over and over. “All I want—” He paused. This far from the press, his mind clouded with doubts. He began to feel an edge of fear. He’d been important, above, before the leadership change. What was he now?
By the ink-dusted, fading glow of his skin, Xachar watched a rat run across the opposite wall. It clutched a shred of blank paper in its teeth. A damp stain spread across the dark, uneven ceiling. He smelled something rank and heard a mad laugh echo down the basement hallway from another room. His ears caught a mechanical sound—but it was only the edge of a lock turning metal against metal.
And as the hours turned into one long night, Xachar’s dust-layered glow began to fade. Darkness gathered around him.
Then footsteps. A lock’s turn. Xachar shook himself awake.
The figure who knelt beside him was none other than the lead officer from the Far Reaches campaign. He recognized the man’s voice from speeches at Gladulous Hall.
“You have fixed the Great Press before, have you not?”
Xachar nodded. He cleared his throat, trying to find his voice.
The officer didn’t wait. “What is your loyalty to the First Leader? To the Pressmen? To Knowledge?”
Xachar looked up at him, confused. They were obviously no longer all the same thing. He thought for a moment. A lie could be the end of him. Choosing wrong also. “My loyalty is to the Great Press,” he finally acknowledged, using the officer’s name for it.
“That is a better answer than most.” The man lifted Xachar up by his shirt. “You are still needed.”
On the stairs, the officer made him swear to another First Leader—the third such in two years. “You’ll be guarded night and day,” the man added—but did not tell him anything more until they reached the pressroom hallway.
“I understand,” Xachar said. Although he didn’t. Not yet.
Along the wide hallway, the former Pressmen’s chairs sat empty. The printing presses of Knowledge had ground to a halt. The officer saw Xachar glance twice at the empty chairs and shook his head.
The silence from the pressroom felt as thick as storm clouds. “What did you do?” Xachar whispered. How long had he been in the basement?
“Yesterday, while you were . . . occupied, the former First Leader tried to reassemble part of the press, to make it work faster. She . . . failed.” The officer shrugged. “The Pressmen are now governed by a ruling committee of fifteen, who advise the first leader and will all make decisions regarding how the press is run. Our first decision was to have the original functions restored. It’s only been a few days. You will be able to fix it quickly.”
He opened the door, and Xachar stepped through. The room was dark. He knew the gem would be ice-pale before he checked. “Get me all the remaining books with print on them still in storage. Even those with Knowledge if you have to.”
“But—”
“Do you want the press running? Do you want to be able to continue to distribute Knowledge?”
It was enough. The officer backed away, and soon a cart full of books arrived.
Xachar busied himself with sorting out what had happened. There was another bent gear, two more wheels added. And the ghost of a gem at the press’s center, he reminded himself. He needed to prepare to see that. He removed the unnecessary parts from the press and laid them carefully nearby, in case he required them later.
The press was clogged with ink. No one had cleaned out the scupper. A wad of paper had worked its way in between the gear shaft around where the emerald was hidden, like a cocoon. Xachar’s teeth clenched in anger.
He found the Pressmen’s tools where he’d left them—they’d been shoving books into the feeder without any tune-ups. Xachar muttered and shook his head. He pulled the paper away from the emerald’s setting. And gaped.
The Midnight Emerald had grown quickly. Had the Pressmen had been overfeeding it, trying to make it work faster? During the time that Xachar had spent in the basement, it had nearly doubled in size. Its facets had the oil sheen of a polished gem, but parts of it looked new and raw. It was ghost-pale, starved of ink, but it had grown. Up and around the press frame.
The cart arrived, the officer pushing it himself. “We’ve scoured the barracks and the town. Unless there are books secreted away, no one in Quadril has any more.”
Will this be enough for now? Xachar wondered.
The officer seemed to read his mind. “It has to be enough. If we stop distributing Knowledge, there will be insurrection, and then who knows what will happen to the Great Press.”
From within the pressworks, Xachar heard something, or thought he did. A voicelike rustling. He’d heard it in his dreams too. His jaw tightened at the thought of the press being destroyed. What would the Midnight Emerald suffer, without ink? A vision came: the hallway, emptied of blank-eyed Pressmen. What would become of Quadril?
He had to protect it all—Quadril and the Midnight Emerald, both.
The whispering continued. “Yes,” Xachar heard himself saying. “Yes, I think I can help you find the hidden books. Let me get a pen.”
The gem, it turned out, remembered every ounce of ink it had sucked from the now-blank books, the shapes letters took when they were laid on the page, and the words’ sounds. It remembered the smell of other books besides those it had wiped clean. And where those books had been. The books those books had been shelved next to. All it had to do was whisper to Xachar, and the remaining books—thousands of them, hundreds of thousands—could be revealed from their hiding places.
Xachar stayed in the press room for a full week writing the list by hand. When he gave it to the new leader, it was a hundred pages long.
“We’ll find them for the mighty press,” the Pressmen’s leader said.
Xachar smiled. The emerald would be pleased to have more ink as it grew.