"There's so much more to the library than you realize!" I waited with the twelve men of my unit in the shade of a mud building. "And Renou's girlfriend has agreed to give us a tour."
The Big Fat Guy slicked his hair all the way back. "Well why we waitin'? What we need him for?"
Haron nodded. "I say we find her, knock out this tour, and go get us some pussy before dinner."
"I need go?" Tenae raised a hand. "I go there before."
Rolon shrugged. "How about whoever wants to do the tour—"
The library was at the center of the city. All major streets led there. To the right were more stone buildings of the old city. Behind it, the tall towers of the inner sanctum rose into the blue sky and shimmered in this oppressive heat, and to the left were mud apartments some four or five stories high with grass all over, inside which the air was cool and comfortable.
The place was huge. A dais rose two feet from the street and wrapped around on all sides, hemming in a wide, brick walkway through perfectly shaved grass leading to three stories of centuries-old stone. There, a pair of arched double doors sat beneath a stained-glass rosette that had to be fifteen feet across. Along the roof, a stone Bear guarded the main entrance flanked by Wolf and Rattlesnake, while Crane and Orca held the corners.
"Listen," I crossed my arms. "You wanted to know what we're fighting for? There's secret knowledge in that library. They have a whole section of books that are illegal in the Empire. Maybe just open your mind, and you'll find something to appreciate!"
Turic grinned. "I appreciated that… gods, what was her name?"
"Which one!" Haron laughed. Half the men laughed with him.
I was losing.
Again.
Across from us beneath a paper umbrella was an old woman wearing nothing but a cotton loincloth. Her skin open to the Terrible Sun, she stood beside a cart selling big, green globes of coconuts for half a kren. All I had in my coinpurse was a sixty-fourth that was more green than bronze I'd found in the grass earlier.
"There they are!" Renou's high voice called out from behind us.
Bilal was with him; his short stubble had grown into prominent Goloagi curls. He looked us over with a grin. "How's Team Jinati Cheese?"
"Piss off!" Haron spat. "Who won out there?"
"You mean after we killed you losers?" Bilal turned to me; he would always have that square chin. "What the hell happened to your face?"
"I fell down the stairs."
Renou tapped his arm. "Tell him what you told me."
"I split my men into three squads, each one has a squad leader—"
I didn't need an explanation. "If I get killed out there, they don't waste time arguing. Renou, Tenae, Haron."
Bilal gave out a light chuckle while my men gazed at me. The names had just come out; I truly didn't think about it.
"I'm with Haron." Turic stood beside him.
Kaye shuffled over to Haron as well.
"You don't speak his language!"
He shrugged. "I lurn."
Tenae waved his hands before him. "My teem no libry!"
Before I could protest, Vayance joined Tenae's team.
Aydel went over to Renou. "We're doing the library, right?"
Rolon and Daemon glanced at Aydel, then each other. "Do we separate here, man? We said we'd stay together, yeah?"
Montus and Josha the Kid filled out Renou's team. Tenae grabbed Ajak, who'd been watching in confusion. He tapped the number branded onto Ajak's arm, showed him the number on his own, and the two of them nodded together. Lastly, Rolon stood beside Haron while Daemon went with Tenae.
"Let's go!" Haron started to lead his squad off.
"Wait!" I said. "There has to be some rules around this. Your whole squad stays together. Lose a man, lose a point."
"Point for what?" Daemon asked.
No idea. "That's negotiable."
With that, two-thirds of my team abandoned us, and Bilal went back to wherever he came from. They were all too scared to witness the library, anyway. That left me beneath the sweltering sun with Renou, Aydel, Josha, and Montus.
"Just us, then?" Renou looked among his squad.
Inside the library was a massive, gold-plated chandelier with a hundred unlit candles suspended over the open foyer. That table was where Saewi spent the evening playing with Chirpy and flirting with my friend Geraln. Same day Massi got his throat ripped out.
Maybe Geraln was still out there somewhere?
We've been over this.
Be quiet.
The clinking, glossy sound of wooden hammers smacking into the pipes of the water organ filled the room. Behind me, Aydel—same guy who came from Kyfe with Rolon Piss-Connoisseur and Daemon's bony arse—was playing The Lady With the Diamond Trees.
And he slayed that shit, too. His fingers moved up and down both keyboards while his feet worked the pedals and levers. I stood in awe of him; I couldn't coax my hands to play different notes.
"Please be careful!" A young woman's voice called out in a faint Goloagi accent.
Aydel stopped playing; his hair brushed his shoulders as he looked up at her. "I won't break it.
When we turned, Renou was wrapped up with a young woman in a passionate kiss. She was the same height as him and very lean, Goloagi, nearly-naked as the natives with a light-blue silk flap front and back hung over a shimmering, white silk belt. Renou's hands reached beneath the silk to cup her bum, and both her arms were over his shoulders locking him in place.
She broke from him and pushed him away. "I'm working!"
Straightening out her garment, she addressed Aydel with a poke to Renou's side. "It's just that if you're good at it, we'll make you do it again, and again, and again, and again!"
Renou blushed and smiled wide.
Her emerald-green eyes settled on me. "What happened to your face?"
"Bug bite."
She pursed her lips, fighting to contain a giggle.
Renou gently rested a hand on her shoulder. "Guys, this is Janaya. Janaya, this is my squad."
She nodded. "Aydel, I know you…"
"Renou's the squad leader," I added.
"Squad leader?" She gazed upon her boyfriend.
Renou brushed that off with a shrug.
Janaya grinned. "Oh, you're gonna get it!"
He laughed.
"On this tour." She poked him in the chest. "You won't know the time or the place. But rest assured—it will come to pass!"
While the rest of us laughed, Janaya settled on Josha. "And you are?"
"Josha of Statac," I said. He was the smallest man on my team, and like Kaye, too young to fight a war. He could track and shoot, and he was the first to help carry Segay when we started training with Miyani. "And though he can shoot, as soon as money was on the line, he backed down."
Josha lowered his eyes to the floor.
"Aww!" Renou's girlfriend furrowed her brow and grabbed his arm. "I love guys like that!"
"Really?" Josha asked.
She glanced between us as if it were obvious. "Uh, yeah, they're not broke all the time!"
For the record, I did have a coin in my purse. "This is Montus of Delyaand. Renou, wasn't there an official report about something involving one of the sekɪwa at the Lake of Doom?"
"Gods!" Montus lowered his face and buried his eyes in his hands. He could shoot; he was from Agnack, the same region as Trey and Filau, the twins who'd been killed at Praying Mantis. But while they were Owl clan, Montus's eupin bow was covered in Falcon scripture written in old Herali runes.
Renou's curly hair shook as he barely contained a giggle. "Oh yes! So there was a… minor… uh… OK so basically he had a thing for her, and uh… things got messy."
Montus brushed his fingers through his hair and gritted his teeth. He also had a big forehead. "Look. I…"
Janaya smirked. "You took a shot, so what if you missed?" Then she took my wrist and showed him the scar Blue gave me. "And if you want to know about messy, ask Miyani how he earned this one!"
Montus smiled and relaxed, and Janaya looked among the five of us. "You guys ready?"
We all nodded.
"Over this way!" She led us along the wall opposite two groups of girls and boys approaching their teens taking turns trading arguments, one on each side of Peyumi, the Elder of Elders.
The ancient woman waved briefly at us, we waved back, and she went back to her students.
Janaya had seven circular burn scars in a row on each arm. When Montus kept looking, she explained. "I did it myself."
"You…" he pointed. "You burned away your slave number?"
She shrugged. "I saw these cute sandals, and it just didn't go with them. Now, how many of you know about this one?"
We faced an oil painting of a giant spider straddling the world below, its legs spanning a mountain range.
"Long before these walls were built, the xamiyɪ'a—that's the tribe who lives in this area—believed the world had grown corrupt and evil. The people were so evil that it caused xɪdaði to hatch from her egg deep underground. She was so big that when she crawled out, she split the land in two and created the Terbulin Mountains. They say she devoured the land for one-thousand-seven-hundred-twenty-eight years, fattening herself on everyone and everything until finally, she laid her eggs deep underground, and died."
In the painting, houses had been ripped apart, villages smoldered in ruin, and the multitude of people cocooned in her web piled into the sky. The detail, the texture, the flow of action drew my eyes in.
Montus leaned in to study the painting. "This is exquisite! The technique… this is…"
Janaya smiled. "It was painted a hundred years ago by a Goloagi artist who'd been stripped of his grand-master title by the Emperor. If you'd like to know why, that blue book will tell you all about it!"
While Aydel, Montus, and I raced for the book, a hand slapped across flesh. Renou cried out and rubbed his arse. "Ow!"
Janaya shot him a wry grin. "Hush!"
Aydel read. "It's called Hidari's Reign. It says that the artist's name was Osvid of Sotyar."
"Shit, man!" Montus's eyes gaped. "This is an Osvid exile piece? Gods, this has got to be worth a fortune! This is real, too, look at the cross texturing!"
Aydel continued. "He was a professor at the university in Golago City until he spoke out against some members of the clergy, and was driven to exile. Two years later, he died of the plague."
"What's this one about?" Josha asked, further down.
"This one…" Houses and trees, people and animals were in flames. Streaks of fire fell from the sky leaving trails of black smoke and consumed everything. There were charred bodies, fire, destruction, and ruin everywhere. Janaya explained. "My mother was very upset."
We all laughed.
"She asked me to string up her laundry, and I accidentally let her special dress fall in the mud."
"Oh, well that—"
"I also kicked it. By accident. The knife wasn't an accident, though."
I covered my face in laughter. All of us did.
Her eyes lit up as she leaned into us. "I have an idea! You have to promise me you won't touch anything! You promise?"
We did.
"No, I really need you guys to promise. I wouldn't even consider this if it were the whole group, but even just the five of you, I need you to swear to whatever god you hold sacred. You won't touch anything!"
We all gave our solemn vows, and Montus asked, "where are we going?"
She batted her eyelashes and grinned. "The fourth floor!"
"There's a fourth floor?" Montus asked.
We all looked at one another and filed after her. She led us along rows of halls filled with books on the right, with the open area on the left, towards a wide, spiral staircase with carved black slate steps and wrought-iron balusters.
I pulled Renou to the side. "So, she seems nice, mister I'll-never-meet-a-girl."
Renou lowered his eyes and grinned. Montus walked beside her. "Aye, how'd you two meet?"
"We have the same birthday. He was registering an account, and when I saw that, we started talking."
"Actually," Renou scrunched his shoulders together. "We kinda met before that. I was the one putting books upside down earlier."
"What?" she stopped and stabbed her gaze at him.
"I was trying to get your attention."
She narrowed her eyes and seared into him, not moving a muscle. Renou giggled lightly and shrugged.
Janaya slowly shook her head, waved a finger at him, and put back on her serious face. "How many of you know that the water organ was donated to us by the Duke of Saen?"
She paused at the foot of the steps to usher us up and continued. "During the Great Plague, the Duke sent his son and heir to Carthia for treatment. When his son returned home, the Duke had it assembled here. Believe it or not, the Emperor himself spent two years at Carthia recovering from the plague when he was young."
As we climbed the steps, a smack echoed across the stone behind me. Renou stood up straight rubbing his bum while Janaya rushed past him.
Upstairs, a balcony overlooked the expansive foyer below. Before the halls of books were several tables and chairs, and a Na'uhui woman went around with a silver pitcher letting off steam and the sharp smell of coffee.
"Hold on love," Montus went over to her, reaching into his purse.
The rest of us waited beside the stone railing and listened to the children debate below. One girl, couldn't have been older than twelve, had the dark-green skin of her mother and long, straight, dark-green hair of her father. She spoke Herali without a hint of any accent. "One cannot dispute the fact that within the vast Goloagi Empire, there's peace and stability. Argue the cost if you want, but the value of centralized rule to provide decisive leadership cannot be overstated."
A boy in the opposing group countered. "You say there's 'peace and stability,' but you haven't been there. You don't live there…"
"Is there war between Heralia and Tobor? Between Saen and Kulun? Between Piandrass and Jinata? Isn't it unrealistic to dismiss everything that isn't experienced firsthand?"
Teryn back home would have called him a poopy-face and moved on.
"What the…" Montus furrowed his brow and scowled. "That's that girl from the market, the one with the card game who took my damned money!"
He sipped his coffee and shook his head. He was right; I didn't recognize her at first.
"Over this way," Janaya called us. The staircase spiraled up to another balcony on the third floor, but she led us down a hall of books instead. We passed two aisles to the left of the forbidden books section, and she paused at a small shelf. "Incidentally, If you take a book down, please don't try to remember where you got it from, just put it here. It would make our lives so much easier."
She stopped beside a black curtain tucked into a corner I'd probably walked past several times since arriving at Carthia. "I have your word you won't touch anything?"
We nodded, and she pulled the curtain to the side.
Behind it was a narrow wooden door with iron braces and a handle on one side beside a tiny keyhole. Janaya wore a string around her neck with a dozen black, iron keys like pendants. She leafed through them, inserted one into the key hole, turned it, and pulled the door open to a dark, narrow stone staircase. One by one, we filed upwards as Janaya closed back the curtain, and the door mechanism clicked shut.
"What's up here?" Montus led the way.
Above us, a cavern with sunlight creeping in on one side surrounded the dark tunnel of old stairs. The whisper of footfalls on stone steps filled the narrow passage until Montus reached the top. "Whooooa!"
Next up was Aydel. "Gods!"
A panel on the roof was open, and a blast of sunlight dominated the room. While my eyes adjusted, unusual shapes appeared in the darkness. A series of hand-written books took up its own shelf. Something like clay heads took up another. Behind us, Janaya's voice chimed. "Watch this!"
She stood beside a circular metal plate and lifted a handle. Rays of sunlight bounced off mirrors in every direction and converged onto a network of milk-white crystals mounted atop iron candelabra throughout. The crystals began to glow and filled the room with soft white light.
"Sorry," Janaya walked over to a long tube thing mounted atop a tripod and covered in a black cloth. "Looks like they set up early. The Wandering Star traverses the Moon tonight, and they have a bet to see if it crosses in front or behind."
"It's in front," Aydel shrugged. "C'mon, everyone knows that."
The room was filled with curiosities of all kinds. At the center stood a jade statue, and shelves all around the walls held maps, books, all manner of trinkets. I found a giant winged insect with a box of gears on its back, just like the one in Ulum. I reached for the lever that turned the crank on the side.
Aydel slapped my hand away.
I wasn't going to touch it.
"Who was she?" Montus stood beside the jade statue of a woman in the center of a room. Her hair and loincloth were carved from white marble and fused in place with gold. Her right eye was carved amber, and her left eye was a blue sapphire.
"Her name was gevʊŋi," Janaya joined us. "Over a hundred years ago, during the conquest of Heralia, the then Duke of Heralia had signed Agreement Thirty-One with the Emperor, but there were elements among his people who did not want to be a part of the Empire. He agreed to find them a place to go, outside of Heralia. When he arrived at Carthia, he found a small island in the middle of a river with pirates, runaway slaves, and outcasts. Among them was gevʊŋi, who was a collector of books. When the Duke met her, he built up the walls all around the city, and all the castles and outposts as a network for defense, and he personally oversaw the construction for over thirty years. After he was finished, he built this library and arranged to have his entire collection brought here, many of which are still on these shelves."
She smirked and wiggled her nose. "There are whole biographies about their relationship downstairs, in case you're curious. Come look at this!"
Some contraption sat on top of a wooden box, about head-high. Janaya looked among us with a grin. "All of you, stand over here."
The five of us scrunched together.
"Ok, now look this way." And she directed us, ushering us close together, keeping an eye on some markings on the floor. She moved Aydel's arm lower and directed me behind the others. "Perfect! Now, when I say freeze, you have to not move for a whole minute. You can't even blink."
"What the?" Montus protested.
"Wait for it."
While she lifted a black hood from behind the contraption and scooted underneath, we all tried to wiggle out the urge to move as best we could. Renou squeezed his eyes closed repeatedly.
"Ready?"
She opened a satchel with something like a framed sheet of paper and slid it into a side panel.
"And… freeze!"
She opened a front panel to reveal a circle of glass in front of a cone, and clicked on something in her hand.
I fought it. Goodness, you know I fought it. I wanted to blink, and right when I was about to give in, Janaya, looking at her timer, closed the cover. "OK, you can move now. Feel free to look around, this'll take about twenty minutes. Remember not to touch anything."
"Holy shit!" Aydel cried from across the room. "Is that tarrock?"
"What's tarrock?" Josha moved over to him.
It looked like a piece of rock about the size of my fist. Black, dark gray somewhere in there, with light-colored spots.
"I've never seen a specimen so big before!" Aydel beamed.
"What's tarrock?" Josha asked again.
"You don't know about tarrock, man?" Montus came close.
"What do you know about it?" Josha answered.
Aydel explained. "It's one of the biggest mysteries in the science of geology…"
When I was helping Geraln prepare for the knowledge tourney, we found a book in Father Yewan's study that had a chapter about it. That same book also had a chapter about how and where to find gold, which I read twice.
"... So you know how a rock is made, like, if it's volcanic rock, you can tell by looking at it. Tarrock is a compressed bitumen with sediment, but it's found where that kind of thing shouldn't be able to form, and it's all over the place. Miners used to call it safo, because it always occurred in a wide, flat layer at the same depth everywhere."
Across the room was a slanted desk with edges, compasses, and sharpened charcoal in a tray. On the shelf beside it was a wooden tray with two rows of six holes, filled with colorful glass beads.
"Where's Renou?" Aydel looked around.
Josha held his breath and his body went stiff. "Oh, no! We're going to lose a point!"
"We haven't lost anybody," Montus waved that off. "We all know exactly where he is and who he's doing it with. Just stay here until he comes back."
On one shelf was a collection of insects encased in some kind of amber beside a pair of brass looking glasses. Another shelf had several crystals on metal stands, arranged in some kind of formation such that a faint, red, line of light spider-webbed between them. When I passed my hand through it, dots of red light landed on my skin.
"What's in here?" Aydel stood beside a black door with iron braces and rivets. A heavy steel bar stretched across, held in place by a chain and a very heavy lock with a teeny-tiny hole.
Some ten minutes later, Renou called out from the bottom of the stairs. "Guys! You've got to come hear this!"
Downstairs, Janaya stood beside the forbidden books section. In her hand was a red book bound in strange knots with a swirly pattern of strange letters on the cover in black ink.
We all gathered around, and she instructed us. "The books in this section are not to leave the library under any circumstances. A lot of them are extremely rare, and most are irreplaceable. Who would like to know how this one came here?"
Renou was relaxed. He stroked her shoulders and kissed her neck as she talked. The rest of us were silent.
"About thirty, maybe forty years ago, there was a woman named Inasi. She was a sea captain, known to never back down from a dare. Everyone thought she was obnoxious and annoying. One day, someone challenged her: why don't you go sail across the Great Western Ocean?"
With his hands on her hips, Renou nibbled her ear.
She giggled and batted him away. "Maybe you know, and maybe you don't, that the Great Western Ocean had never been crossed."
"It still hasn't." Montus crossed his arms.
She batted her eyebrows and nodded. "Sailors would try. Sometimes they would come back after a whole year, starving and ragged and say it's endless. Most are never seen again. So you understand that among sailors, daring someone to cross the Great Western Ocean was a fancy way of saying, 'go away and stop bothering me.' But Inasi took it seriously. She said, 'I will cross it, and I'll come back and tell you what's on the other side.' So she gathered up her crew, sold everything she had, loaded her ship with food and supplies, and left beyond the horizon."
"Did she ever come back?" Josha leaned close.
Janaya grinned. "During the height of the Great Umeazi Plague, a ship appeared over the horizon. It had been so long, no one remembered her let alone what her ship looked like. But she came back, and she had this book with her."
"What's it about?" Josha knelt low to look more closely.
"No one knows," she grinned. "Inasi and her entire crew fell ill and died of the plague before they could translate it. But," she pulled a sheet of paper tucked beneath the cover and smiled at it. "She wrote this letter before she died."
Josha tried to crane his neck up to look at the paper.
She slipped it gently back behind the cover. "If you're curious, you'll have to come back and read it! Over this way…"