Even the echoes contrived to his advantage, something that had not even occurred to Valentine when he’d made the plan: should he ever be tailed by a knocker, the plentitude of stone walls and arches, bronze sculptures, and bridges overhead would exponentially multiply the echoes of his footsteps, and make tracking him nearly impossible.
So it was with a sense of elation that Valentine, after a brief jaunt through the dark tunnels in Trowth’s underbelly, emerged near the Royal Mile. That sense persisted as he hailed a cab, and took it to the outskirts of the city, back to Vie Abbey, which had been his goal from the outset.
The elation only faded when he arrived, and saw another small hansom, parked at a short distance from the entrance to the Abbey, where a third gentleman, this one wearing long moustaches, looked very much like a tourist haggling with his driver over the cost of his fare. Of course they had someone just follow the coach, too. Idiot, Valentine thought to himself. Oh, well. He approached the mustachioed man. “Hallo, chum,” said Valentine in his brightest, cheeriest voice. “Shouldn’t be too long there. An hour or two, maybe, if you want to hop off and get a tipple before we resume.” He handed him the now-empty djang cup. “Oh, and would you mind dropping this for me with Christo, over at Haypenny, if you get around there any time soon? Thanks much.”
He left the astonished man, holding the used cup, and headed up towards the abbey gates, nodding and smiling at the uniformed guards who stood, miserable and frigid in the icy air, eternally at attention.
“I can’t let you look at any of those things, of course.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?” Valentine asked the bishop’s secretary’s adjunct. “You have to. Look at the little badge, for fuck’s sake.” He waved the copper coroner’s shield in front of the man’s face.
“It’s illegal, for one,” said the man, middle-aged, with graying hair and a sturdy familiarity with his job that he was plainly loathe to forgo. He wore red and purple robes with an ornate white and gold shawl; finery deeply at odds with the man’s stubbornly ordinary features. He looked as though the real secretary’s adjunct had stepped out for tea, and just thrown a cassock over a local shoemaker and had him fill in. “And it’s a heresy for another. Do you want me to get in trouble?”
“You can’t get in trouble,” you fucking idiot, Valentine said. “I am the Coroners. If someone were going to come here and arrest you and execute you, it would be me, and I’m already not going to do that.” YOU FUCKING IDIOT.
The man had wet lips that he kept licking nervously. He pouted suddenly. “How do I know this isn’t some kind of a trick?”
Valentine suppressed the urge to pound his head on the desk. It was a lovely wooden desk, in the adjunct’s small, tastefully-appointed office. There were books on the shelves, weathered and worn as though they’d actually been read, and a podium with a great, leather-bound copy of the Grammars on it. “Well, that’s a good point. But, how do you know what my plan is? Maybe I’m here to arrest you for impeding an official investigation, and I’m just trying to trick you into not letting me see the books.”
The adjunct paused, and actually seemed to consider the idea, which nearly had Valentine chewing the carpets in frustration. “All right,” the man said, after a moment. “But you’ve got to make sure that you sign in.”
He led the coroner through the corridors of Vie Abbey. The Abbey had been built long before the Architecture Wars, and so well before the Vie-Gorgon’s had settled on their long, thin, narrow style of design. The Abbey had an old-world feel to it-broad hallways, fat columns on geometric plinths, galleries and balconies everywhere. What wasn’t dull gray granite was covered in rich, vibrant tapestries, depicting the history of the Goetic Church and the Church Royal all the way back to the Immolation. They followed the halls down past the library, to a dank, wooden room filled with rough tables and dirt.
“You have to wait here while I get the ledger,” the man said, and left.
Valentine sat down on one of the benches and tapped his feet. He’d begun to read the quarto that Beckett had found, as per instructions, but was having a certain amount of trouble. It wasn’t that the text was unclear: it was, in fact, almost frighteningly clear. And specific. And simple. It was the kind of text that could have instructed a ten-year-old in heretic science and produced quality results. The problem was simply that Valentine had nothing to compare it to-whether this quarto was more or less simple than traditional ectoplasmatic texts, whether it conformed to establish beliefs on heresy or church doctrine, the coroner had no idea.
One of the troubles, he mused, while he waited for the adjunct to return, with secret information is that those of us who are charged with finding it won’t recognize it when we see it. The Coroners were given scant little information about the nature of the crimes they were to investigate-only the effects. Beckett had gleaned more than a little just from his history, but Valentine was stumbling about in the dark. And, lucky stumbler that he was, the young man had stumbled onto an idea: the Church Royal, he knew, made a habit of collecting heretical texts. They were rare, of course, and access was restricted. But if he could just get in and have a look at one or two, it might give him…well, he didn’t know what it might give him. He only knew that he didn’t know anything now, and could only think of one way of knowing more: the library.
“Here it is,” the church official said as he returned, carrying a huge, dusty book whose pages looked brittle enough that they might crumble to dust from being looked at too closely. “You’ve got to sign in, and I’ve got to make you sign an oath.” He opened the book and set it in front of Valentine.
The coroner put the date, and then wrote his name in-the second name on this page. The previous entry was someone with a last name that looked like “Feathersmith,” and was dated more than a hundred years ago. Valentine would have to turn the page to see any of the earlier entries, but he was genuinely worried about the integrity of the book.
“All right, the oath, hang on.” The man took a small piece of paper from the pocket of his robes. “Dost thou swearen, upon…er…sorry, it’s in Middle-Trowthi, I don’t think anyone’s updated it in about five hundred years. Just say yes when I’m done. Ah. Swearen that thee lawfulle secretes herein enclosed, by sondry means and many, shalle by Holie Saviour and Pyre and Worde, remaine fit and kept by hearte to ende?” He paused and, after a moment, nodded at Valentine.
“Uh. Yes.”
“Okay, come on.” The adjunct took Valentine through another old wooden door, and down a set of stone steps into a long, dark, room. The light that spilled down from the stairs only served to illuminate a small semicircle around the two of them. The coroner could see three shoulder-high sets of bookshelves, extending off into the dark. They were packed with books, withered, decaying pamphlets, rolled-up scrolls, and little tin plates with glyphs etched on them.
The adjunct muttered something, and then threw a great knife-switch by the door. Immediately, dozens of blue phlogiston lamps pulsed to life, buzzing faintly, bathing the room with their light.
It was enormous.
This sub-library must have stretched for a hundred yards off at least, and was nearly fifty yards wide. And throughout the entire space those long, low bookshelves stretched, each one packed full of books and papers and words.