Ancients of Days

Chapter Six The Hell-Hound

The Strangers’ Lodge of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons was built around a small square courtyard.

Tiers of long, narrow balconies rose above the courtyard on three sides; on the fourth was a sloping wall of metal as transparent as glass, on which the last light of the sun glowed like the shower of gold by which, it was said, the Preservers had manifested themselves for the first and last time on the world, when they had seeded it with the ten thousand bloodlines.

Yama bought Eliphas supper in the refectory on the ground floor, and they ate at one of the long tables with a decad of other petitioners. All were crowned by the restless sparks of fireflies; there was no other light in the long room. Yama’s wad of papers was by his elbow, an untidy rainbow fanned on the table’s scarred and polished surface, for he did not have deep enough pockets to hold all the documents he had been given. His wound had been washed with an astringent lotion and freshly bandaged.

Despite the trick with the fireflies, the chief of clerks, Kun Norbu, had insisted that Yama should prove that he had been able to persuade the guardian of the Gate of the Hierarchs. Yama, still clothed in a thousand fireflies, walked up and down the stairs beneath the arch three times before a growing audience of clerks. It seemed to him that they would have watched him do it all night, and after the third time he told Kun Norbu that he had not come to the library as a mountebank or clown, and returned the fireflies to their former hosts, retaining only a pentad of those he had recruited from the local wild population. This trick astonished the clerks more than that of being able to pass the guardian.

Kun Norbu dismissed every clerk but Tzu, who assiduously dealt with Yama’s paperwork, and then the chief of clerks had taken Yama and Eliphas to his cluttered office, where they sat on dusty couches and drank tea sweetened with honey. It seemed that Kun Norbu was an old friend of Eliphas’s, and he said that he was at Yama’s service.

“Tell your story, young man. Tell us how we can help you.”

Yama explained that as a baby he had been found in a boat on the Great River, that he had been told that his bloodline was that of the Builders, long thought to have transcended the world. He said that he had come to Ys to search for others like himself, and added that he suspected that a certain Dr. Dismas had recently found important clues in this very library. Kun Norbu listened patiently, and then asked Yama a hundred questions, most of which he could not begin to attempt to answer. He found himself saying again and again, “If I knew, I would not be searching for the answers myself,” or, “I hope to find that here.”

“You will need to provide a sample of blood and a scraping of cells,” Kun Norbu said at last. “That will be a good beginning.”

Eliphas said, “Then you will take his case, brother. I am glad.”

Kun Norbu smiled and said, “I think we might learn as much from the answers as Yama.”

Yama said, “You know something about my bloodline, dominie. I see that you do. Can I find what I am searching for here?”

Kun Norbu’s smile widened. His black eyes twinkled behind the lenses of his spectacles. “Not everything is to be found in libraries.”

Eliphas closed his eyes and recited a fragment of text in a lilting chant. “They were the first men, part of the word which the Preservers spoke to call forth the world. They were given the keys of the world, and ordered it according to the wishes of their masters.”

Yama said, “Is that from the Puranas?”

Eliphas’s smile was a wide white crescent in his black face. “It sounds like the Puranas, doesn’t it?”

Kun Norbu said, “It is from a text much older than the Puranas. Perhaps it was written by one of the Builders. Eliphas and I were enthusiastic hunters of obscure texts when we were as young as you, Yama. I gave up the carefree life of searching for lost knowledge many years ago, when I became a novice clerk, but now, do you know, I feel quite young again. You have rekindled my sense of inquiry, which I had thought long ago extinguished by the responsibilities of my office.”

Yama said, “Then we should start at once! Why must the truth be approached through many bits of colored paper?”

He had been given passes for the library, the refectory and one of the dormitories of the Strangers’ Lodge. His name, age, and birthplace (Yama had given it as Aeolis) had been written down on a pentad of differently colored pieces of paper. His question had been copied ten times over, and all the papers had been stamped with Tzu’s mark.

“It is the way things are done,” the chief of clerks said. “You are young, Yama, and would tear down the world and start all over again. You value speed over all else. Everything must be done at once or given to you as soon as you need it, or the world must be changed. That’s how it is with the young. But as you get older, you’ll see the wisdom in the way things have always been. Old men like Eliphas and me see why things are the way they are, and why they have grown in particular ways, and how everything is connected. We see that without direction velocity is nothing but squandered energy.”

Yama said, “Surely knowledge should be free to everyone, since all knowledge is the gift of the Preservers.”

“Ah, but if it was freed,” Kun Norbu said, “who would look after it? Knowledge is a delicate thing, easily destroyed or lost, and each part of the knowledge we look after is potentially dependent upon every other part. I could open the library to all tomorrow, if I was so minded, but I will not. You could wander the stacks for a dozen years, Yama, and never find what you are looking for. I can lay my hand on the place where the answers may lie in a few hours, but only because I have spent much of my life studying the way in which the books and files and records are catalogued. The organization of knowledge is just as important as knowledge itself, and we are responsible for the preservation of that organization.”

“He will be up all night looking for the answers,” Eliphas said to Yama, and told Kun Norbu, “It is good to see the light of adventure in your eyes once more, brother! I thought you were falling asleep behind the ledgers and the rulebooks.”

“I keep my hand in,” the chief of clerks said, “if only to keep the apprentices on their toes.” He made a steeple of his fingers. They were each tipped with a black claw like a rose thorn, and linked by heavy, wrinkled webs of skin. He looked at them and said, “Have you ever been ill, Yama?”

“Just blackwater fever and ague. I lived beside the river.”

“I ask because I do not know if Builders are susceptible to illness. Be glad of your childhood fevers! If any of your people live, then some of them will almost certainly have been treated by chirurgeons or by apothecaries, and the records of all chirurgeons and apothecaries are preserved here. That is how I will search, using the template that lies within your cells as a guide.”

He summoned a young clerk, who took a scraping from the inside of Yama’s cheek with a blunt needle and drew a minim of blood from the tip of his thumb with a glass straw. These samples also required documentation, and Yama’s signature, and Kun Norbu’s stamp.

When this was done, the chief of clerks bowed to Yama and said, “You need not lodge in the commons. You will be my guest. My household is yours. I will have someone find you fresh clothes and see that your wound is cleaned.”

“That is kind,” Yama said, “but I do not deserve special treatment. And the wound is an old one. It does not trouble me.”

He feared that Prefect Corin might hear that the library had an uncommon visitor, one who could command fireflies and ancient guardians.

Kun Norbu gave Yama a shrewd look and said, “You cannot try and pretend that you are ordinary, Yama. And your wound has been bleeding recently. At least allow me to have someone look at it, and to recommend that Eliphas look after you. He knows as much about our little library as any, although he will never admit it.”

After Yama and Eliphas had eaten, Eliphas filled the bowl of a long-stemmed clay pipe with aromatic tobacco, lit it, and puffed on it contentedly. Yama asked him where he had found the passage he had quoted.

“It was on a scrap of paper which someone had torn from a book an age ago and used to jot down the addition of a bill of small goods. We found it tucked between the pages of an old record book. Paper is very patient, and old paper in particular is well made and forgets very little. That scrap had preserved the verse about your people on one side and the trifling calculation on the other, and had also patiently kept the place which someone dead a thousand years had marked. It is not that things are forgotten, simply that they are mislaid. Bindings of certain books are a good example of where such things may be found, for pieces of older documents are often used as backing. There’s no end of places to look. Kun Norbu and I looked in many strange places when we were young.”

“I am beginning to believe that I am mislaid,” Yama said. “That I do not belong in this time. Many times, when I was younger, I hoped that someone was looking for me.”

“You must have courage, brother. I am curious about one thing, though. May I ask a question?”

“Of course.”

“Why, there’s no ‘of course’ about it. I simply do my duty, as the Preservers would wish. I do not expect you to satisfy my idle curiosity as reward. But thank you. My question is this. If you do learn where your family lives, what will you do?”

“I would ask them why I was set adrift on the river, to begin with. And if they answered that, I would ask them… other questions.”

Eliphas blew a riffle of smoke. “Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going?”

“Something like that.”

“Forgive me, brother. I don’t mean to make light of your predicament.”

“If they live at all, I think that they must be living somewhere in Ys, or in the boreal lands upriver of Ys.”

“Then hope they live in Ys,” Eliphas said. “The land upriver is wild, and full of races which have not yet changed, or perhaps will never change. Most are little more than animals, and do not even have an Archivist to record their lives. The city streets are hard, yet with a little money and a modicum of cunning one can endure them. But it is not so easy to survive in the dark forests and the ice and snow of the boreal regions at the head of the river.”

Yama sighed. He was beginning to realize the magnitude of his task. He said, “The world is very large, and not at all like my map.”

“Your map must be very old. Little has altered on Confluence since the Age of Insurrection. It is true that when bloodlines reach enlightenment, the change wars that follow usually destroy their city. But the survivors move on, and there are always prelapsarian races to take their place, and all seems as it was before. New cities are built upon the old. But what stood in those places at the beginning of the world? I would very much like to see this map of yours.”

“I left it behind when I came to Ys.”

Yama told Eliphas about Aeolis, and the peel-house and its library, and Eliphas said that he knew of the library of the Aedile of Aeolis.

“I knew the present librarian, Zakiel, before he was disgraced and sent away. Sometimes I envy his exile, for the library has a certain notoriety. It is said that an original copy of the Puranas is lodged there.”

It was the book that Zakiel had given Yama when he had left Aeolis for Ys. His heart turned over when he realized the value of the librarian’s gift. The book was with his satchel and the rest of his belongings in the little stone cell in the House of the Twelve Front Rooms, in the Department of Vaticination. He must return there tomorrow, and discharge his obligation to Tamora. And then he must flee, for he must not be captured by the Department of Indigenous Affairs. If that happened he would certainly fall into Prefect Corin’s hands.

He said, “Zakiel was one of my teachers.”

Eliphas blew a smoke ring and watched it widen in the air, then sent a second, smaller smoke ring spinning through the fraying circle of the first. He said, “Then no wonder you value knowledge. With your permission, brother, I’d like to sleep now. We must rise with the sun if we’re to get a place at the carrels.”

Only one of the Lodge’s dormitories was open; clearly, the library had seen greater use in former times. But the beds, although narrow, were comfortable, and the sheets clean. Eliphas snored and someone else in the dormitory talked in his sleep, but Yama had risen early and had faced death and had walked many leagues, and he soon fell asleep.

He woke in pitch darkness. The hairs on the back of his neck and on his forearms were prickling and stirring, and he was filled with a feeling of unspecific dread, as if he had escaped the clutches of a bad dream. There was a faint light at the end of the dormitory. At first Yama thought sleepily that the door was open, and that it must be morning. But then he saw that the light was vaguely man-shaped—although taller than most men, and thinner than any living man should be—and worse, that it was moving. It drifted like a bit of waterweed caught in a current, or like a candle flame dancing in the draft created by its own burning. It reminded Yama of nothing so much as the wispy lights that could sometimes be glimpsed after the river Breas had flooded the ruins outside the city wall of Aeolis. The Amnan called those apparitions wights, and believed that they would steal the soul of any traveler they could entice into their clutches.

Yama had known, because Zakiel had told him, that the lights were nothing more than pockets of marsh gas which kindled in the air upon bubbling to the surface of stagnant water; Zakiel had once made a demonstration, with water and a bit of natrium in a glass tube. But knowing what the wights were did not make them less eerie when they were seen flickering in the darkness of a bleak winter’s night.

Unlike a candle flame or a marsh wight, the burning figure gave off no light but that which illuminated itself.

The long dormitory remained in shadow, lit only by the dim clusters of fireflies which clung to the walls above the beds where their hosts slept, but when the thing stooped over the first of the beds, the sleeper’s face was immersed in its spectral light. The man murmured and turned halfway around, but he did not wake. The thing disengaged itself and waved through the dark to the next bed.

Yama discovered that he was clutching the sheet so hard that his fingers had cramped. He remembered the light which had burst through the shrine in the temple of the latriatic cult and the thing he had felt rushing toward him from the depths of the space within the shrine, and knew that the apparition was searching for him. He sat up cautiously. His fireflies brightened before he remembered to still them, but the burning figure did not appear to notice.

It was bending toward the third sleeper, like a librarian patiently searching a shelf book by book.

Yama put his hand over Eliphas’s mouth and shook the old man awake. Eliphas’s silver eyes opened at once, and Yama pointed to the burning figure and whispered, “It is looking for me.”

Eliphas bolted from his bed, clutching the sheet to his skinny body. “A hell-hound,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “Save us! It is a hell-hound.”

“It came from a shrine further up the mountain. I think it means me harm.”

Eliphas was staring at the apparition. His shoulders were shaking. He said distractedly, “Mountain? Yes, I suppose that the Palace would resemble a mountain to someone not used to large buildings.”

“It stands between us and the door. I think we should wait for the guards.”

Another man’s sleeping face appeared in the hell-hound’s blue light; the man groaned horribly, as if gripped by a sudden nightmare. Yama thought that everyone here would remember the same dream when they woke—and then realized that if the hell-hound could affect men’s dreams, then perhaps it could also see into them. That must be what it was doing, browsing through the minds of the sleepers as a scholar may browse in a library, hoping to gain insight by serendipity.

Yama snatched up his shirt and the harness which held his sheathed knife, and said, “I am going to climb through one of the windows. You can come with me or stay, but I would be happier if you followed me.”

“Of course I’m coming. It is a hell-hound.”

Yama opened the shutter of the window above his bed and climbed out on to the balcony outside. When Eliphas followed, clutching his clothes, Yama turned up the light of their fireflies and discovered that they were only a few man-lengths above the mosaic floor of the courtyard. He swung over the rail of the balcony, with a rush and a shock but no harm.

Eliphas let his clothes flutter down and followed more cautiously, and sat down after he had landed, massaging his knees. “I am an old man,” he said, “and my days of adventuring are long past. This was never part of the bargain.”

Yama pulled on his shirt and shrugged the harness around his shoulders. “You do not have to follow me,” he said.

Eliphas was pulling on his trousers. He looked up and said, “Of course I will follow. I mean, I think it would be better if I did. The hell-hound is looking into the minds of those men, and some remember that they saw you with me. And if it looks into my mind it will find my conversations with you. What might it do then?”

“Then you had better show me how to reach the Gate of the Hierarchs. I will get us past the guardian. I have no intention of staying here.”

“I think it would be better if we found Kun Norbu. He will know what to do. And the guards are armed.”

“We will return in the morning,” Yama said.

Eliphas might have argued the point, but a blue light appeared at the balcony above. They both lost their nerve then and ran.

The guardian of the Gate of the Hierarchs had been driven deep inside itself, and did not notice when Yama and Eliphas passed by. It was a few hours before dawn. It was not cold, but Yama and Eliphas were soon mantled with dew after they sat down to keep watch from a turn of the long flight of stairs high above the library. Yama said that Eliphas could leave him as soon as it grew light, but Eliphas said that he would as soon stay with Yama.

“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.”