Was that what I was doing?
“Good day, Scrivener Viraine,” I said, and left.
I got lost then, figuratively and literally.
Sky is not generally an easy place in which to get lost. The corridors all look the same, true. The lifts get confused sometimes, carrying riders where they want to be rather than where they intend to go. (I’m told this was especially a problem for lovesick couriers.) Still, the halls are normally thick with servants who are happy to aid anyone wearing a highblood mark.
I did not ask for help. I knew this was foolish, but some part of me did not want direction. Viraine’s words had cut deep, and as I walked through the corridors I worried at the wounds with my thoughts.
It was true that I had neglected the inheritance contest in favor of learning more about my mother. Learning the truth would not bring the dead back to life, but it could certainly get me killed. Perhaps Viraine was right, and my behavior reflected some suicidal tendency. It had been less than a turn of the seasons since my mother’s death. In Darr I would have had time and family to help me mourn properly, but my grandfather’s invitation had cut that short. Here in Sky I hid my grief—but that did not mean I felt it any less.
In this frame of mind I stopped and found myself at the palace library.
T’vril had shown me this on my first day in Sky. Under ordinary circumstances I would have been awed; the library occupied a space larger than the temple of Sar-enna-nem, back in my land. Sky’s library contained more books, scrolls, tablets, and spheres than I had seen in my entire life. But I had been in need of a more peculiar kind of knowledge since my arrival in Sky, and the accumulated lore of the Hundred Thousand Kingdoms could not help me with that.
Still… for some reason, I now felt drawn to the place.
I wandered through the library’s entrance hall and was greeted only by the sounds of my own faintly echoing footsteps. The ceiling was thrice the height of a man, braced by enormous round pillars and a maze of floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Both cases and pillars were covered by shelf upon shelf of books and scrolls, some accessible only by the ladders that I saw in each corner. Here and there were tables and chairs, where one might lounge and read for hours.
Yet there seemed to be no one else around, which surprised me. Were the Arameri so inured to luxury that they took even this treasure trove for granted? I stopped to examine a wall of tomes as thick as my head, then I realized I couldn’t read a single one. Senmite—the Amn language—had become the common tongue since the Arameri’s ascension, but most nations were still allowed their own languages so long as they taught Senmite, too. These looked like Teman. I checked the next wall; Kenti. Somewhere in the place there was probably a Darren shelf, but I had no idea of where to begin finding it.
“Are you lost?”
I jumped, and turned to see a short, plump old Amn woman a few feet away, peering around the curve of a pillar. I hadn’t noticed her at all. By the sour look on her face, she’d probably thought herself alone in the library, too.
“I—” I realized I had no idea what to say. I hadn’t come in for any purpose. To stall, I said, “Is there a shelf here in Darren? Or at least, where are the Senmite books?”
Wordlessly, the old woman pointed right behind me. I turned and saw three shelves of Darren books. “The Senmite starts around the corner.”
Feeling supremely foolish, I nodded thanks and studied the Darren shelf. For several minutes I stared at them before realizing that half were poetry, and the other half collections of tales I’d heard all my life. Nothing useful.
“Are you looking for something in particular?” The woman stood right beside me now. I started a bit, since I hadn’t heard her move.
But at her question, I suddenly realized there was something I could learn from the library. “Information about the Gods’ War,” I said.
“Religious texts are in the chapel, not here.” If anything, now the woman looked more sour. Perhaps she was the librarian, in which case I might have offended her. It was clear the library saw little enough traffic as it was without being mistaken for someplace else.
“I don’t want religious texts,” I said quickly, hoping to placate her. “I want… historical accounts. Death records. Journals, letters, scholarly interpretations… anything written at the time.”
The woman narrowed her eyes at me for a moment. She was the only adult I’d seen in Sky who was shorter than me, which might have comforted me somewhat if not for the blatant hostility in her expression. I marveled at the hostility, for she was dressed in the same simple white uniform as most of the servants. Usually all it took was the sight of the fullblood mark on my brow to make them polite to the point of obsequiousness.
“There are some things like that,” she said. “But any complete accounts of the war have been heavily censored by the priests. There might be a few untouched resources left in private collections—it’s said Lord Dekarta keeps the most valuable of these in his quarters.”
I should have known. “I’d like to see anything you have.” Nahadoth had made me curious. I knew nothing of the Gods’ War that the priests hadn’t told me. Perhaps if I read the accounts myself, I could sift some truth from the lies.
The old woman pursed her lips, thoughtful, and then gestured curtly for me to follow her. “This way.”
I followed her through the winding aisles, my awe growing as I realized just how truly big the place was. “This library must hold all the knowledge of the world.”
My dour companion snorted. “A few millennia worth, from a few pockets of humanity, nothing more. And that picked and sorted, trimmed and twisted to suit the tastes of those in power.”
“There’s truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.”
“Only if one knows the knowledge is tainted in the first place.” Turning another corner, the old woman stopped. We had reached some sort of nexus amid the maze. Before us, several bookcases had been arranged back-to-back as a titanic six-sided column. Each bookcase was a good five feet wide, tall and sturdy enough to help support the ceiling that was twenty feet or more above; the whole structure rivaled the trunk of a centuries-old tree. “There is what you want.”
I took a step toward the column and then stopped, abruptly uncertain. When I turned back, I realized the old woman was watching me with a disconcertingly intent gaze. Her eyes were the color of low-grade pewter.
“Excuse me,” I said, spurred by some instinct. “There’s a lot here. Where would you suggest I begin?”
She scowled and said “How should I know?” before turning away. She vanished amid the stacks before I could recover from the shock of such blatant rudeness.
But I had more important concerns than one cranky librarian, so I turned my attention back to the column. Choosing a shelf at random, I skimmed the spines for titles that sounded interesting, and began my hunt.
Two hours later—I had moved to the floor in the interim, spreading books and scrolls around myself—exasperation set in. Groaning, I flung myself back amid the circle of books, sprawling over them in a way that would surely incense the librarian if she saw me. The old woman’s comments had made me think there would be little mention of the Gods’ War, but this was anything but the case. There were complete eyewitness accounts of the war. There were accounts of accounts, and critical analyses of those accounts. There was so much information, in fact, that if I had begun reading that day and continued without stopping, it would have taken me months to read it all.