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.”