The Library of Forgotten Books (14 page)

Waves of hot and cold coursed up my back. To myself I said, “There was so much I didn’t do.”

The Guardian’s voice, for all its warping in and out of existence, sounded dreamier as it spoke: “I had so many books to write. There were things inside me that I never had a chance to say.”

I continued: “I wanted to publish books, you know. I wanted to travel. I should have escaped to Caeli-Amur. I wanted to climb the white cliffs to the artists’ square, or head out on a sailing ship over the crested waves.”

The Guardian laughed. “Caeli-Amur, the jewelled city of the south.”

“What kind of books did you write?” I asked.

“Poems about the emptiness of the lone lover—I’d recite one to you but the words slip from my mind nowadays, as if they’re only real when written down. I laboured over those things, day and night. I deprived myself—I drank thick black coffee, I smoked little cigarettes and pored over the words by gaslight. Now they’re all forgotten. Even by me.”

“I’d like to read one,” I said, trying to befriend the creature.

“But now Treskoti will write you off like one of his damned books: ‘Item lost.’”

I said, “Help me find my way out. You know the way.”

The laughter came again.

I laid my head on my forearm, desolate and alone. After a while I raised it again and spat out, “No wonder you’re down here: look at you.”

Finally the Guardian spoke. “I’ll lead you from the labyrinth,” he said. “But you must do something for me.”

“What?”

“Come back and meet me tomorrow. You must come back and speak with me, every day, until Aya’s handprints are hidden on the moon, and the great disk is only a sliver in the sky. Oh, and I have a task for you.”

Back in the foyer, Treskoti stared at me, his leathery face impassive. “Alisa,” he said, “Where have you been?” He stepped forward and spoke in an angry rhythm: “The day...is almost...over...and you’ve...been lazing...around somewhere...hiding...avoiding...your responsibilities.” He stood back, adjusted his suit and added, “I’d hate to see you out on the street with the rest of the jobless.” He waited for my reaction, and when I gave him none he said, “Now get back to work.”

When I left the library, the summer heat was oppressive. The grubby streets were packed with horse-drawn carriages banking up against each other, Kyre-bird rickshaws ducking in and out between them, the long legs of the birds scrabbling on the cobblestones. I descended to the underground train that criss-crossed the city, passing the Undercity to the Kinarian Pocket.

I settled in a small bar lit by red lights and purveying exotic liquors imported from all across the world: peaceful flower-liquors from the Island of Aya, ice-cold desert drinks from Numeria, Anlusian hot-wine guaranteed to fill you with unnatural energy, as well as powders made by the city’s alchemists, tinctures by the forest sages in the surrounding areas. In drinks and drugs, as in everything, Varenis was the centre of the world. Leaning against the polished dark-wood bar, I searched for my shallow friends—Tori or Ganus or Matildha—quickly made, quickly forgotten. But at the tables were only unfamiliar red faces that seemed almost demonic. Just as I looked away I caught a familiar sight. At a table in the corner leaned Ister, his head craned forward on his long neck, pen in hand, bottle of ink beside him.

“I trust that you have been looking after my books,” he called to me.

I walked across and leaned against the wall next to him. “They’re in the Labyrinth beneath the Library.”

“I see,” he said sadly. “I suppose they’ll never be found. Then again, there are many little gems lost in this city.” His eyes were dark and brown and like a deer’s and again I felt transfixed.

“When the repression is lifted, your books will be found and published.” I sat myself beside him.

He laughed at that, reached forward and lightly touched my hand. It felt as if some unknown power surged into me, a flash of lightning. “Yes they will.”

“And I’ll start the printing shop that I’ve always intended to,” I said, “and your books will be read not only here, but in Caeli-Amur and across the sea.”

“By then there’ll be no need for my books. They’ll have served their purpose.”

“Oh, how sad.”

“No, no! How happy! A writer can only hope that his books will be forgotten! It can only mean that all those struggles that we write about are transcended. That the yearning is over and in some way we are finally whole.”

The following morning as I walked through Palasin’s hall towards the Labyrinth, a voice whispered in my ear. I jumped, half-turned. Mrs Emmago was leaning out from one of the aisles.

“Mr Agee will soon be working for us.” She smiled knowingly.

The fat blubbering man came immediately to mind. “What do you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?” She nodded, the smirk never leaving her face. She tapped her nose with her forefinger twice and then spun away. I rushed after her as she swished down the aisle.

“What happened?”

She turned and shook her head, mock-sadly. “He was found hiding books. His own,
forgotten
books. Arrested immediately.”

“But surely...”

“Once the order is made, well, the order is made,” said Emmago. “You can’t just remember everything now, can you? It isn’t natural. Some books, after all, have to be forgotten.”

“Everything gets forgotten,” I said and then spat out, “Everything that ends up in this library.”

She stopped walking and her face quivered. There was sadness in her eyes and she looked off into the distance above my shoulder. “You’re a clever little thing, aren’t you? We all wanted something else, didn’t we? I wanted to travel, perhaps to Numeria.” She looked at her feet. “Do you know, they say there’s a room in the labyrinth, and from that room leads a tunnel, and the door at the end of the tunnel leads to wherever you want to go. Imagine that! Anywhere you want to go.” She snapped out of her reverie and focussed on me. “It’s rubbish. As if you can go anywhere you want!” Without a further word she hardened her face and walked on, this time slower, as if away from a defeat.

When I entered the Labyrinth, I kept my head down, avoiding the blackness that shifted towards me.

“Follow me,” it said.

I followed at a distance. Occasional gusts of frigid air came from the black shifting stain, forever morphing out of formlessness and into some kind of contorted and unnatural shape—now an arm too long for its body, followed immediately by a knotted shoulder. Then they twisted back into darkness while a foot with great claw-like nails appeared and a leg bent in unnatural places.

A while later we entered the
cul
de sac
and I stepped behind the wall-hanging. I pulled the lever and the elevator shuddered. A moment later a blast of icy air came from the Guardian as his whole body shimmered into our world from the Other Side. I wrapped my arms around me.

The room was as I’d left it, with the books on the table. The chair was comfortable as I sat in it. “You know this room?”

“I saw you the first time,” it said. “I was here with you...in the room...observing. I found you enchanting. It took some effort, residing entirely on the Other Side. We can stay there a while, though eventually we must return to this half-life half-way through a doorway but jammed by the door.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Just to talk. It’s not much, is it? But when you’re...in this half-life, it seems the strangest thing in the world.”

“But you’re a Guardian! You’re...”

“Evil?”

I said nothing.

“They destroy us; they bind us—forgotten authors guarding their own forgotten books! And what little enjoyments we have...”

I thought of this Guardian sucking the life from someone, taking her in its cold embrace and dragging her into the half-death, into the zone between worlds, eating her soul—Guardians are killers.

“Are you a man?” I asked.

“I was.”

“That explains it.”

It laughed eerily. “I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for a woman. I’d be long and happily dead. What damage love can do! And yet women, you’re so...mesmerizing.”

Disturbed by the direction of the conversation I reached down and took Ister’s book, absentmindedly opening the pages and flicking through to where I had been reading.

“You can read if you like,” said the Guardian. “I liked watching you read.”

The words sent chills down my spine, as if I had awoken to find someone watching me in the dark. But I preferred to read than to continue the conversation, so I turned to the book and again was lost in the story of Bikrim.

At the end of the shift, Bikrim’s arms and legs tremble. But he needs them to be strong. He digs the grave with the others in the ice-hard ground, passing the jackhammer between them, their smudged and drawn faces emptied of emotion. Kala had given a scream, as if something had burned him, his bald head looking up to the sky, his face filled with surprise and pain. Then he’d collapsed. Just like that. White blood had dribbled from his mouth, through his bared and grey teeth. The sentry said to leave him there and get back to work. And now, eight hours later, they’d dragged the corpse away from the pipes and were doing the job of burying the heavy bastard. There’s death everywhere, thinks Bikrim. This time Kala, last week Efrim’s hips were crushed by one of the pipes. His scream was piteous; he took a long time to die. And before that one of the pipes exploded under pressure, fragments of metal driving into Vilim’s eyes. His were more groans than cries—deep guttural sounds. Who knows what happened to him?

Bikrim needs to return to the city, to the mountain of metal and pipes, where there is life. There is no life out here on the mountain where the liquid metal runs. There is only cold and frost and spots of hard ice dotted along the slope. The other workers, their dark faces blackened by smudges of dirt, are too exhausted to speak. It’s almost as if we are mechanical men, thinks Bikrim. We don’t control the pipes and the liquid. They control us, the way an engine controls a cog. But he doesn’t say it because he doesn’t feel like he belongs. He’s always felt this way, as if he has past lives, as if he is really another person, somehow placed in the wrong body. But it’s just his loneliness. He looks at his trembling hands and notes that there is blood there. He wipes it with his other hand, and then he feels the pain. Where has the cut come from? He doesn’t know. It will not heal properly. Nothing ever does.

The mechanical birds drop from the sky, headless, their complex inner workings uncovered, the intricate lacework of their feathers almost fragile. But the gusts of air they produce are torrential, swirling around the workers' hairless heads.

Bikrim and the others step wearily, heads down, into the baskets. The mechanical birds grasp the baskets with their vices and lift them all up into the freezing air.

“This is no way to live,” says Bikrim but the others don’t hear him, or if they do, they ignore him. No one wants to be reminded of the truth.

When I looked up from Ister’s book, I said to the Guardian, “I was there.”

The darkness shifts around me. “He’s latent, of course.”

“Latent?”

“Ister—he’s a latent thaumaturgist. He’s a weaver. That’s why you were there. He projected you into the world. He
created
that world. I can feel the power surrounding you as you read.”

I looked at my hand and there seemed to be the slightest scar running ragged across it. “But a weaver who can invoke like that: there hasn’t been one in what, a hundred years?”

We left the room and the Guardian led me through the labyrinth until we entered an ancient corridor, the stone walls crumbling, statues cut from white marble in the style of the Ancients along its walls. An open archway let to a tiny grotto at its end.

“Where are we?” I asked.

The Guardian stood before a statue of a short man with a proud face, handsome in its own way, with accusing eyes. The statue looked off into the distance, as if it was searching for someone. Carved into the base was a name, “Amacus.”

“It’s me,” said the Guardian. “And in that grotto are my poems.”

“Amacus. You’re an Ancient?” I said. “Why did they ban your books?”

“Oh, they didn’t,” he said. “Before the rise of the Directorate, this really was a Library for forgotten books—books which had gone out of print. It was a treasury, you know. My books were...” He stopped and breathed heavily. “If only people still read them: then there’d be something left of me.” Amacus made a noise, like the sound of water gurgling down a hole. I walked away, appalled; and he remained, shifting and morphing in front of his statue. He was crying.

Some time later, he said to me, “Your task is to smuggle my poems out of the library and publish them. Tomorrow we will return here, and you can take the books.”

The wooden wheels clattered on the cobblestones. Agee held onto the bars of the prison-cart. His fat face was empty; its flesh was smooth and relaxed. Instead of crying, he seemed exhausted. Dragged by two horses, the cart slowly made its way to the centre of the square where a machine—a complex construction of scaffolding and harnesses—stood on a platform, surrounded by engineers and mechanics. And behind them the thaumaturgists in their sharp suits, their faces cold and cruel, like the sciences they controlled.

The crowd of a thousand or more watched, some grinning toothless grins, others whispering excitedly. Yet others shifted on their feet in nervous anticipation. The smell of sweat drifted around in the summer heat.

Treskoti had closed the library for the day, so that we could all witness the transmigration. Across the square I could see his calm acquiescence, as if everything was in its place—the demeanour of a Head Librarian.

“They’ve drugged him,” said a voice. Ister was next to me, his neck craning towards the stage.

“They’ve come to watch like vultures eyeing carrion.”

“And yet you’re here too,” he said.

“They don’t even know what he has done, they haven’t read his books, they’re just here for the entertainment.”

Ister looked on. “It’s not their fault is it? What have they to look forward to? They are degraded, but by...” he waved his hands around, gesturing to everything around us, “this.”