“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.”