Jorit
Jorit, sitting on the floor beside Ania’s empty cot, shook like a windblown page.
A clock ticked fast, then slow.
Between one moment and the next, the cot’s frame creaked as Ania settled once again onto her side of the mattress.
“So tired.” The voice was Ania’s, but the accent was that of a long-ago lapidary.
Jorit, sitting beside her friend, smiled and smoothed the librarian’s blanket, then her hair. “Sleep, then.”
Ania closed her eyes, and soon her breathing slowed.
Meantime, Jorit’s mind raced. She’d seen the clock break. She’d seen the Master Archivist disappear. She’d seen her friend’s eyes change—now, sometimes, they were the color of the fire opal.
She’d seen Ania disappear, leaving Jorit more alone than she’d felt since Marton had been carried away.
And the clock now? She lifted it in her hands. Almost as good as new. The fire opal was still cracked, but the rest of the gears and bindings worked.
Jorit chewed her cheek.
A woman with the eyes of a gem would be of great interest to the Pressmen. The gem’s time manipulation and insight, even more so. The old Jorit might have said that was worth the price of safety. The Jorit who had lived through the past didn’t agree.
She sat up straighter, to better guard the clock while her friend slept.
She knew more things now.
She’d heard the gem speak. She’d heard Ania argue with it.
Ania knew she could fight using time. Jorit was starting to understand this. And if time, then perhaps knowledge too.
She’d heard something joyous and desperate behind the gem’s words when it fought with Ania. Gems could control things, but they liked being argued with . . . at least this one did.
“Sima,” Jorit whispered. Silence was the only reply.
The former thief slumped to the floor. It had been worth a try.
The cot creaked again.
“Time,” Ania whispered, and it was her voice, her accent now. She roused herself from the cot.
“To what?” Jorit replied.
“To leave,” Ania said. She gathered books from the pile and several more from the stacks, then split these between her pack and Jorit’s.
* * *
That night, the two women walked through Far Reaches University’s gates, past the sleeping guards, and through town. The shell-pocked cobblestones crunched beneath their feet. The wind smelled of salt and waves.
As they headed toward the water, seagrass lined the road, scrub bushes dark against the deep blues of evening. A steamer’s chimney billowed white smoke across the hued seascape. A bird clacked its beak. Jorit caught herself slowing down, enjoying the scenery, the moment.
“My brother used to say that the shared memories bound in the libraries of the Six Kingdoms could be used for a greater good, beyond university walls. He would have liked the original Pressmen, I think.” She blinked in the sharp salt air.
Ania tugged at her hand. “We can’t slow now, Jorit. If we sail in the morning, we’ll arrive a few weeks after we disappeared. I hope that’s enough to avoid changing the past. Then we can catch the printing press and the gem inside.”
Jorit shook her head. “You have a better sense of this than I do now.” But she left her hand in Ania’s for a moment. Then squeezed and let go as they approached the harbor.
At the main dock, several long wooden boats rode high in the water, their goods unloaded and carted away. Jorit tasted pepper in the air, smelled a husk of spices. She followed her nose to the ship that had come from a trading hub. “That one’s from Quadril.”
The captain of the Farlook took their money and gave them two canvas hammocks in the hold. The hammocks swayed with the tide and the wind, and Jorit and Ania slept for much of the journey. When they woke, they copied out versions of the books that Ania had memorized to the sound of sails flapping in the wind.
More than once, the rocking of the boat threw them together. They would lean on each other, steadying themselves. But not for too long.
Slowly the boat made its way down the coast. Slowly they sailed past Pressmen on the march on the shoreline. They tucked some of their books in with packages going ashore, kept others with them.
By the time they reached Quadril, they’d copied and scattered more volumes of The Travelers’ Guide throughout the land, and while Jorit slept, Ania even managed to send two copies back in time with the gem’s help.
As they approached the outskirts of Quadril, they saw smoke rising above blue and white flags near the docks. The Pressmen’s barracks. Tents fanned out from several buildings at the center. Carts darted in and out, bearing books and people.
“I’d stay clear of that,” the Farlook’s captain said. She waved another load of spices aboard as she spoke to Ania and Jorit. “Strange happenings. Heard some people have disappeared near there.”
Jorit nodded. “We’ll stay well clear.” And they disembarked as the sun set behind the town.
Once it was dark, Ania and Jorit bribed their way onto a cart that was headed for the barracks. When they neared an area cordoned off with sawhorses and crate barricades, they saw a low building emitting glowing green smoke. The pair crouched down and slid out of the cart.
“That’s it,” the lapidary said. She started walking with Jorit toward the building.
Wait! Jorit bit back the word. She flexed her hand against the clock instead. She patted Ania’s arm, pulled on her hand. Her friend had started charging ahead since the fire opal began seeing with her eyes. “How will we get inside?”
“We have to figure out what it wants.”
It . . . not them. The gem. The emerald. Jorit pulled Ania behind a tent. “We know what it wants. It wants books. Knowledge that doesn’t belong to it.” Her hand was gentle on Ania’s wrist, but she wanted to pull the librarian far away, to safety. “It wants one unified voice that it can control.”
Crouching low, Ania drew out the last three books they had. She looked at them intently, then at Jorit. Her eyes filled with concern. “I don’t want these to be lost.”
“Perhaps we can find more,” Jorit said. But her face told a different story. There likely weren’t any other books, not in all of Quadril.
“It had to be those books, my favorites, my treasures,” Ania whispered. “Of course it did.” She smiled sadly. She handed The Book of Gems to Jorit. Looked at her friend and touched her cheek. “I don’t want anything to be lost.”
Jorit shivered, then ran her fingers across the glittering cover. Opened the book, placed her palm against the old paper, the ink. “We’ll find a way,” she said, feeling the loss already. This was history; they’d discovered it, and now? Even she didn’t want to give them up now.
Ania rose and walked straight up to the building with the odd glow, her shoulders set. She knocked on the door, looking around. A few guards stared at her from the shadows. They did not try to stop her.
“They’re afraid,” she muttered. “They have reason to be.”
After a very long pause, one in which Jorit began looking for something to break the door, a lock turned. Hinges creaked. A sallow-faced young man answered.
Then Jorit knew they had no other option. The last books had to be bait. “You,” she whispered. “From the library.” You betrayed us.
The young man sucked his teeth. “You can’t come in here.” But his voice was soft, as if he very much did want Ania and Jorit to enter the pressroom.
“We can come in, Xachar,” Ania said. Her eyes shone. “And we very much must.”
The young man braced against the door. Ania pushed harder and Jorit pulled out The Book of Gems. She held it where the young man could see it. “I heard you were looking—”
The young man nearly salivated over the book. His fingers grazed the cover. “Where did you find this? We’ve been desperate. Gone to desperate measures.”
When Ania pulled the book from his reach, Xachar lunged for it.
“You don’t understand. This could save a life. Many lives if there are more.”
“There are more, Xachar.” Ania lifted the blank books into the light.
This time, Xachar grabbed Ania’s arm and Jorit’s robe, not the books. In a very different, stronger voice, he said, “I will show you why. I’ll show you wonders.”
Xachar pulled them down a hallway strewn with empty chairs and open doors to empty rooms. Ania thought the building had been abandoned until Xachar slowed near two figures wearing Pressmen blue, slumped on wooden chairs by a final closed door. Ania saw their hands and ankles had been tied to the wooden frames.
From beyond the door came a repetitive thunking. Despite the noise, Ania bit her lip to keep from making any sound.
Xachar didn’t notice. He pushed the door open, then pulled the books from Ania’s hands. Although the room was warm, the Pressman shivered. Without looking at the books’ contents, Xachar fed The Visitors’ Guide to the press first, pushing it beneath the rollers and sighing audibly as the second-to-last gem of the Six Kingdoms hungrily drained the ink from the pages.
Ania stifled a groan. Jorit gritted her teeth. The thing was monstrous.
“That,” whispered the fire opal with Ania’s voice, into Jorit’s ear, “is what you must destroy.”
The press was overwhelmed by the emerald. No longer binding it, the gears were solely a source of ink production for the gem.
Jorit smelled the machine’s inner workings as they heated up to devour another book—The Book of Gems. She blinked, recognizing the acrid scent of mining mixed with the richer tones of inks.
She could feel the gem’s pulse—and hear its fragility. She looked more closely at it when Xachar wasn’t paying attention.
Her miner’s experience paid off—the emerald wasn’t an emerald. It was colored glass. Leaded and fired, with shards of gemstones running through it. All the facets were stained dark—knowledge, ink, and blood curled through them like smoke.
“A fake,” she muttered.
When the inked air around the gem drove her back, Jorit gagged. The smell, the taste of it in her teeth. She coughed then, and Xachar straightened, looking at her with a sad smile, still holding The Book of Gems.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
“It’s a fake gem,” she said to Xachar. “It’s worse than that. It’s—”
Xachar moved closer. “That’s not something you should say. It’s beautiful.”
The press had stopped creating anything but more of itself—of the emerald. And yet Xachar couldn’t see how monstrous it was.
She looked at the boy’s eyes. They were ink-filled. So were his fingernails. He had a small crust of green glass at one wrist. “Xachar, you are in deep danger.”
But Xachar shook his head. “I’m filled with knowledge. I can show you.” He reached for Jorit.
Ania cried out and put two of the blank books on the press. As they slid through the mechanism, the emerald paled, trying to pull ink from empty pages.
Xachar groaned and swung his hand to knock the books from the rollers. They clattered to the floor, splayed and torn.
Xachar reached for Ania. And the clock began to tick faster.
“No!” Ania cried. “Wait. We can’t leave now.”
Jorit lurched forward—Ania couldn’t leave. Not this now. This here.
But it was too late, the clock glowed, and she could feel the heat. And Jorit was falling toward the press, away from Ania. Jorit put her hand out for balance on the press, and the emerald spread quickly, covering her fingers, trapping her.
Calm, stay calm. She tried to tug her hand away. The emerald groaned. Xachar turned from Ania to grab Jorit’s hand and hold it still.
With her other hand, Jorit grasped Ania’s shoulder. “Go,” she said. “Hurry. There’s still time to get this right. They are trying to use the press to change everything.” She could keep Ania from harm. She could help stop the press.
But Ania blinked, her eyes no longer brown and still filled with tears. Her opal-colored eyes gleamed as she whispered, “I know. They’re trying to rewrite the past.”
“You attempted to poison the press!” Xachar countered, his voice breaking. “To hurt the emerald.” In his anger, he pressed Jorit against the machine. The emerald grew faster, up Jorit’s hand, facets tightening around her arm. As the gem grew, she felt things she knew—names, places—draining away.
The room wavered. The smell of ink overpowered her senses.
A woman with a fierce expression, her braid swinging free, stood before Jorit. She held a clock. Jorit felt a memory tug at her, then disappear.
The woman’s eyes blazed. They were beautiful and terrifying. “Time won’t let you rewrite the past, Xachar,” she said, sounding sad.
Then with a yell, the woman raised the clock over her head. An opal glowed, bound within the clock’s bent gears.
The pale, ink-stained boy lunged away from where he’d gripped Jorit, toward the woman. He shouted, “No, I must keep it running!” but the woman brought the clock down hard on the press. The clock’s frame splintered, but its brass gears and the opal they contained jammed into the dark gem, beside Jorit’s trapped arm.
When the clock-bound gem smashed the press, it seemed to scream. The woman screamed with it. And when it screamed, all the ink flooded away, tagging everything in its path with traces.
On Jorit’s face, a small swirl of ink curled. On the woman—Jorit knew her suddenly—Ania’s arm, a swash. Xachar’s eyes filled with the ink and then ran free, in dark tears.
“I didn’t know,” he whispered.
Cracks ran along the emerald with a sound like ice breaking in a Far Reaches harbor.
When a crack spread the length of two facets, more breaks spawned from it, until the fake gem collapsed into dust.
Jorit shook her arms free. She reached for Ania, overwhelmed as all of the memories of their travels flooded back. She knew now what she hadn’t wanted to admit before, in the crush of stopping the press. She didn’t want this person to disappear again.
Ania held her hand tightly.
A loud, creaking groan filled the room.
Without the gem to hold it up, the press listed sideways. Its stressed mechanisms began to disassemble and crack. Pieces fell from it; gears and shafts and rollers struck the floor. When the ink scupper fell away, a cloud of dust rose into the air. As Jorit and Ania held their breath, the dust shaped words that had been stripped from the world in the name of knowledge.
Compendiums of Knowledge stored in the room began to leak. Dark ribbons of ink seeped onto floors and walls.
The ink formed stolen letters, crawling across the floor into words, each one writing itself back, moving fast across the room, under the door, out the windows, in search of their own books, signs, and papers.
Rubbing her arm, Jorit stepped from the room, Ania supporting her. They clutched several books they’d managed to save from the press.
Xachar sped past them into the barracks. Jorit let him go. The ink had left his eyes. Soon he knelt next to a woman who was slowly blinking, the light coming back to her own eyes. “Aunt,” Jorit heard Xachar murmur, “where are the others?”
All around Jorit and Ania, waves of ink swept over the ground and through the air. They followed lines of ink out of the barracks, into East Quadril. Others walked with them, Pressmen and townspeople both, all staring as the ink flowed into words, seeking out the books and shelves where they’d been before.
They passed the library in Quadril, which had been sunk into its foundations. There, words paved the streets outside and decorated the buildings nearby. The blank books Jorit had rescued from the pressroom were soon filled with letters again.
Ania held the former clock’s pieces together in her hands, unconsciously clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth as she walked until Jorit steadied her.
The librarian lifted her eyes, opal-colored now, and stared at the town, the books in her hands. “Yes, I agree.”
She turned and kissed Jorit’s cheek quickly, almost bashfully. “You didn’t have to stay,” the librarian said.
“Yes I did,” Jorit replied, pulling Ania to a stop in front of the library. “I wanted to see what would happen next.”
“We happened next,” the librarian whispered. “We changed the future. I can see it.”
Jorit felt the librarian’s skin pressed against hers, the glow of her opal eyes and the steam from the pressroom drawing sweat across her palms. She felt the pulse of her heart, like a clock speeding up, and felt her own heart keep time with it.
She ran her fingers across Ania’s cheek. Soft as a moth. Kissed her lips, even softer.
After a moment, she whispered, “We happen next.”
They clasped hands, the last gem-bearer and the thief. Around them, East Quadril erupted in shouts, the Pressmen’s barracks emptied, and the world flooded with words once more.