Paul Mcauley - Ancients of Days

“I made a contract with you, brother, and I never let a client down.”

Yama said, “You have other clients before me.”

“I’ll let you into a secret.” Eliphas lit his pipe. When he drew on it, the burning coal of tobacco set a spark in each of his silvery eyes. He was calmer now. He said, “Sometimes, I already know the answers to the questions I am sent to root out of the library. It would not do to tell the client that, though. It would put the business of the library at risk, and my business, too. Besides, no leech will believe that I know something of his trade that he himself does not. It does not do to sell the truth cheaply. Instead, I enact a little charade. I come here and gossip with my friends, and a day later I return to my client and give him, stamped and documented, the answer I could have given him straightaway, if only he trusted me. The library is paid, I am paid, and the client is pleased with his answer. That is why I was so happy to help you. It gave me something to do. Besides, like my friend, Kun Norbu, I feel young again in your presence. I had thought that there were no more wonders to discover in the world, and you have proved me wrong.”

Yama considered this. At last, he said, “The road I travel may be long, and it is certainly dangerous.”

“Don’t think that I know only the inside of libraries, brother, and am innocent of the world. I traveled much in my younger days, searching for old books. It took me to some odd places. I am an old man, brother. My wife is dead, my daughters are married and concerned with their own families, and my only son is fighting heretics at the midpoint of the world. Now, I am sure that we can return to the library when it is light, and find out what Kun Norbu has discovered about your people. And after we find the records concerning your bloodline, I will be happy to help you look for your people. No, I will stay with you. I will do my part.”

“I have some business to complete before I can go and look for my people,” Yama said.

He started to tell Eliphas about the conflict between the Department of Indigenous Affairs and the Department of Vaticination, but he had not got very far when Eliphas suddenly stood and said, “Look! Look there!”

A cold blue light flared below. It defined the curtain wall of the library and several of its slim towers before winking out. There was the sound of men shouting in the distance, and then the iron voice of a bell, slow at first but gathering urgency.

Someone down there had an energy pistol. For a moment, an intense point of light shone like a fallen fleck of the sun. There was a noise like that of a gigantic door slamming deep in the keel of the world, and the backwash of the discharge blossomed above the roofs and towers of the library and threw the shadows of Yama and Eliphas far up the long flight of stairs. The cold blue light kindled again. It was smaller now, and seemed to be climbing one of the towers. Yama saw the flashes of pellet rifles; the sound of their fusillade was like the crackle of twigs thrown on a fire. The mote of cold blue light dropped from the side of the tower, drifting down like a leaf.

Eliphas said, “They have killed it!”

“I do not think so. It has discovered that I am no longer where it thought I would be. It must have found out from one of the sleepers that I was staying in the dormitory, and now it has finished its search, or it was interrupted.”

“Brother, we both saw it fall.”

“I do not think it can be killed by rifle fire, nor even by the discharge of an energy pistol. It is not of this world, Eliphas, but of the world men once glimpsed in the shrines.”

Yama remembered that the woman who had appeared in the shrine of the Temple of the Black Well had told him that there were dangerous things beyond the bounds of the garden she had created. He was certain now that the hell-hound was one of the creatures she had feared.

Eliphas nodded. “Accounts of the wars of the Age of Insurrection speak not only of the battles of men and machines, but of a war in the world within the world. The priests claim that this means that the enemy strove to conquer men’s souls as well as their cities, but archivists and librarians know better. Hell-hounds were weapons in that second front.”

“The Insurrectionists tried to destroy the avatars, and the link between men and the Preservers.”

Eliphas nodded again. “And the heretics succeeded where the Insurrectionists could not. Perhaps they woke the old weapons.”

“I fear that I have a talent for drawing enemies to myself. There! There it is again!” The tiny point of blue light had appeared at the foot of the dark wall of the library. Now it began to ascend the stairway.

Eliphas knocked out his pipe on the railing of the stairs.

His fingers were trembling as he put it away. “We must go on. The hell-hound travels slowly, or it would have caught you long before you reached the library, but I have a feeling that it does not rest.”

Yama and Eliphas reached the long lawn and its fountain just as dawn began to define the mountain ranges at the edge of the city’s wide plain. The library was far below, its towers ablaze with lights, but there was no sign of the hell-hound.

Eliphas sat heavily on the wet grass. “Perhaps it has lost us,” he said.

“I do not think so. It followed me down to the library. There is no reason why it cannot follow me in the reverse direction. You are tired, Eliphas.”

“I am old, brother.”

“And my head aches. But we cannot stay here.”

Eliphas slowly clambered to his feet, unfolding his lanky body in stages. He said, “I’m sure we can spare a few minutes before we go on. I am thirsty as well as tired.”

As Yama and Eliphas approached the ornate fountain in the center of the lawn, two deer ran from it, white scuts bobbing as they disappeared into the darkness. Eliphas thrust his head into a spout of water that gushed from the gaping mouth of a fish; Yama drank from a basin shaped like an oyster shell and splashed cold water on the back of his neck. His head wound had begun to bleed again.

While Eliphas sat on the edge of the fountain’s main basin and lit his pipe, Yama walked back to the edge of the lawn. He was anxious and tired and afraid.

There was now enough light in the sky to make out the various clusters of buildings which were scattered across the long slope below. Yama could see that the library’s curtain wall had been breached—the adamantine stone slumped like melted candle wax—and that its slim white towers were licked with black soot. The path which climbed through the tiers of fields seemed empty, and for a moment his heart lifted. Perhaps Eliphas was right. But then he saw a glimmer of cold blue light emerge from a distant stand of sago palms; the hell-hound came on in an erratic dance like a scrap of fabric caught in a breeze, flitting from side to side, but always moving upward.

Yama ran back to Eliphas, but the old man shrugged phlegmatically when he heard the news and was maddeningly slow to begin to move. Exhaustion had overcome his fear. He knocked out his pipe on his bootheel and said that there were roads still in use, and all led to gates to the interior.

“And where there is a gate,” Eliphas said, “there will be guards.”

“The guards of the library could not stop it. We must go, Eliphas.”

“Some guards are better armed than others,” Eliphas said. He pressed the palms of his hands over his silver eyes for a moment. “The main part of the Palace has always been better defended than the outlying offices. We cannot run forever, brother. If we lead it to them, the soldiers of Internal Harmony will know what to do.”

Yama did not share Eliphas’s faith in this plan, but a small hope was better than no hope at all. He said, “If we are to try and find some way back into the mountain, then we should turn aside. The monastery where I wakened it is not far above. I do not want to confront the shrine again, especially with that thing at my back. I might waken something worse. As it is, I fear that the library is destroyed.”