More out of habit than concern, I checked each of the other three reading rooms that occupied the corners of the big square floor plan. It was well past the library’s official closing time, but the collection was owned by a private fellowship whose members included the club next door, and merchants sometimes kept weird hours. Catering to that trade was half the reason the Ismere had a built-in apartment for the master librarian.
The other half was so that he could provide security for a lot of valuable property. Thanks to magical techniques borrowed from the inhuman denizens of the Sylvani Empire, the actual production of books was relatively inexpensive; but the materials’ costs were high, especially the high-quality paper needed. The Ismere had been started by an extremely successful Kadeshi-born merchant who had paid for the building and provided the bulk of the initial collection. It had been added to steadily over the years by its members—donation of new titles could be used to offset the hefty fees the library charged.
As soon as I’d cleared the third floor, I catwalked down the back stairs to the second floor and gave it a once-over as well. That’s where I found Harad, wandering quietly among the rows of books and checking to see that everything had gotten back to its proper place after the departure of the day’s visitors. Even in the dim light, the many complex spells that wrapped him round made him easy to spot with magesight. Once I’d made sure we were alone, I got ahead of him and stood quietly in plain view, waiting for him to look up and see me. After a few moments, his eyes lifted and met mine, and he waved.
“You’re up late,” I said.
“I’m an old man and don’t sleep as well as I used to. I like to take the opportunity to check on my charges and see that they are resting better than I am.”
“You don’t look that old to me.” And, in truth, he didn’t, no more than fifty, a well-preserved sixty at most, and that in a society where magical healing saw many of the better off into their eighties and nineties.
“But I am old, older by far than anyone most people will ever meet.” He waved a hand. “I exclude you, of course, young Aral. You walk strange roads and see much that is hidden from the ordinary run of folk.”
I smiled, and, for perhaps the twentieth time, asked, “How old are you, Harad?”
He smiled back and winked, and I waited for the usual coy dodge, but it didn’t come. Instead, his smile faded into a thoughtful look.
“Do you really want to know? Truly?”
“Curiosity is one of my besetting sins.” Even though I had more pressing questions and duties, Harad hadn’t visibly aged in the ten years since I’d first met him, and I really did want to know more about that. This might be my only chance to find out. “That curiosity’s what brought me here the first time.”
“A decade ago, in the year that butcher Ashvik—may he burn eternally in the deepest of hells—was slain. I remember it like it was yesterday.” He smiled again. “And in the long book that is my life, that is not so far from the truth. All right, curious boy, I will answer you . . . in a few minutes. Come back to my kitchen, and I will make us tea.”
I wanted to refuse the tea, since it always reminded me of efik, but that might have shut off the potential flow of information, so instead I snorted and grumbled, “Now you’re teasing me.” Triss’s brief squeeze of my shoulders told me that he agreed.
“No, I just prefer to tell things in their right time, and the right time for this tale is still a short way off.”
“Have it your way,
old
man.”
“For far more years than you’ve been alive I have done precisely that. I see no reason to change my ways now.”
I grinned. After Triss, Harad was the nearest thing I had to a friend these days. Unlike Fei or Jerik or any of my other Tienese associations, there was no flow of debts between us, neither of blood nor of money. Just a mutual interest in books and all that lay between their covers. We’d first met because of that. I had snuck into the library one night because I felt the need to get away from my assignment to kill Ashvik—things hadn’t been going well, and I was frustrated. I wanted nothing more than to read some slight volume and let the story lift me out of myself for a while.
Harad had found me at it, sitting in the very reading room where my gear now sat, my nose buried in a particularly lurid sort of adventure novel translated from the original Kanjurese. It was an odd moment really, him knocking very politely on the door frame—the door itself having soundlessly vanished when he approached—and lightly clearing his throat to let me know he was there.
I was mortified, of course, a Blade caught out by a librarian. But as I later learned, he was an exceptionally powerful sort of mage, and that certainly had something to do with it. To this day, I’m not sure why he chose to knock rather than throwing me out or calling in the stingers. Whatever the reason, it put me at my ease in a way I’d never have expected before it happened. Rather than drawing a weapon or some other hostile action, I’d simply set the book aside, and said, “Hello?”
He’d come in then and gently questioned me about my presence in his library and my intent. And, also, by the way, how did I like the book? I’d explained that I liked the story well enough, but that I thought the prose of the translation was pretty awful. That had led to a rather spirited discussion of translation in general, both on the page and in person. Ever since then, I’d had a sort of unofficial library membership and one person in Tien whom I could talk to without the weight of anything beyond mutual interest.
Once
the water for the tea had cooled down a bit from its boil, Harad poured it over the powdered tea and carefully stirred with a whisk. An unusual method for Zhan, it spoke of foreign origins in a way much more forceful than Harad’s Kadeshi name. It also reminded me of the efik ritual, a thought I pushed aside forcefully.
He’d just finished preparing the second cup—his own—when the timesman at the temple of Shan Starshoulders struck the great bell to signal midnight. Normally, I was too far away to hear it, but here in the wealthiest of the merchant districts, it rang quite clear. It reminded me time was pressing, but somehow I still couldn’t bring myself to push Harad.
“There.” Harad touched his ear. “That is what I have been waiting for. It signals the right time for this story.”
“Which is?” I asked into the silence he left for that purpose.
“My birthday. With the tolling of the midnight bell I enter into my six hundred and eleventh year.”
“Your what?”
“Don’t give me that look, Aral. You don’t feign shock well. The teacher who trained you to it emphasized the open mouth too much, and you have a touch of the ham in you, which pushes the whole thing just a
shade
too far.”
The inflection on the word “shade” was so subtle as to be barely there, but it
was
there, and I had to suppress the impulse to twitch when I heard it. Triss, on the other hand, didn’t feel any such constraints. He gave me a sharp jab in the ribs.
Harad went on. “Shock’s not really a good look on you anyway. It undermines the whole tragic but dangerous image. I’d suggest you stick with the eye twitch and then a quick slide back to the blank stare of the gambler, like now. It plays to your strengths.”
I’d recovered by then and also decided he might have a point—Master Kelos had once told me something similar. So I hung on to my closed face. Holding a hot cup in my hands helped there, reminding me as it did of old times and old disciplines at the same time it spiked my desire for a cup of efik.
“But I am shocked,” I said, in a tone that belied the words. “Six hundred years old. That’s awfully hard to believe.”
“No. It’s not. We both know that I’m a sorcerer and a powerful one. It’s a requirement of the job here. The Ismere holds the largest and most valuable collection of books in all of Zhan—mostly because it is private and thus free of the censoring impulses of generations of Zhani royals.” Harad’s smile looked more than a trifle smug. “Like any sorcerer, my life is tied to my familiar’s. As my companion’s is the longer span, we have both measured our threads to his.”
Unlike my dead buddy Lok and the spit-adder, where the lengthening of life went the other way—well, right up until Maylien killed him. I wondered what the nature of Harad’s familiar was but knew better than to ask. If he’d wanted to tell me, he would have.
He continued, “Don’t pretend that you don’t know how that bonding works. If nothing else, you’ve read up on the topic. I know. I lent you the books.”
I looked Harad flat in the eyes. “You know what I am, don’t you?”
I set my untouched tea aside as Triss pressed himself hard against my back. But Harad simply shrugged and smiled.
“Since you ask, yes, though I would not have raised the issue had you chosen to leave it lie. I have known it from the first moment you snuck into my library a week before you rid the world of King Ashvik, the sixth and hopefully last of that name. It’s in the way you walk and the way you hold your head when you lie, techniques passed down through dozens of generations.”
“Like this.” He shifted subtly in his chair and for just an instant I faced one of the masters of my order. Then he relaxed, and it was gone.
“Oh”—Triss slid out from behind me so that he could see better—“that was Kelos to the life. Very good.” Shadow hands applauded.
Harad gave a half bow from his seat, as elegant as any actor’s, but said nothing.
“I don’t understand,” I said after several seconds of silence while I reviewed my options.
They were much constrained by Triss’s choosing to expose his presence. Funnily enough, attempting to kill Harad never ranked as a serious choice. Whether that was prudence or curiosity or simply friendship is still an open question.
“Three hundred years ago, servants of your Namara asked me to help out with the training of her Blades. At the time I was running a theater company in Varya and had been for perhaps fifty years before that. The masters wanted to add some refinements to their techniques, and who better to ask than an acting master. I had become bored with the theater at that point and I thought that teaching assassins might make for an entertaining change of scene. I was right, and I stayed a decade or three.”
“What happened?” I was fascinated but also a tiny bit horrified at learning about Harad’s involvement with my order. It was also funny how the word “assassins” bothered me not at all coming from his lips.
Triss assumed his dragon shape and settled on the floor by my feet. I suppressed an urge to whap him on the nose for exposing our secrets. That pot was already a decade spilled if Harad was being honest with us.
“I got bored and left the temple,” said Harad. “It was a bit too much like working with the acting company, really. Then I moved on to another career and another after that. So far, I think that I like librarian the best. I’ve been here for a hundred and twenty years and might well stay a hundred more. Now that we’ve dealt with that, what brings you to see me tonight? You can’t be done with that necromancer book already.” His eyes flicked to my still-full teacup. “You don’t read that fast or that steadily—it cuts into your drinking time.”
I opened my hands to acknowledge the truth of his dig. “No, I haven’t finished it. It’s both a little too gruesome and a little too silly for me at the moment though I’d like to try it again someday. I was going to pretend that I had read it and ask you to find me something on what’s been happening with the royal family and the succession since the death of Ashvik.”
I continued, “I’ve been going out of my way to avoid as much news of the royal court as I could, but I didn’t want to admit that to you as it might give something away. So I was going to make up a cover story about a new client, but somehow that all seems a little ridiculous now. Instead, I’m just going to tell you what I really want to know, why I want to know it, and everything that’s happened so far. Then I’ll see if you can point me at the right information.”
So I did, with helpful pointers from Triss wherever I failed to mention a mistake I’d made—drat him. And when I was done, Harad found me what I needed.
“This is banned in Tien as propaganda.” Harad handed over a thick pamphlet written in Kodamian:
Thauvik, the Rise of the Bastard King
. “Which it is, of course, but with a core of truth. The banning means that it’s in high demand here at the library. Please don’t keep it too long or, if it should come up, let anyone know where you got it. Everything you want to know about the Marchon girls you will find in there.”
I nodded and flipped the pamphlet open. The city-state of Kodamia was tucked into the great gap of the Hurnic Mountains just to the west of Zhan. It had fought several bitter wars with its larger neighbor over access to that passage and the kingdoms of the west. Kodamia’s strategic position made it the fattest of prizes, and only an astonishingly competent army officered by the dyads—warrior-sorcerer familiar pairings who also served as spies and assassins—and constant vigilance had kept them from succumbing to one of the many invasions they had faced from both sides of the gap. If anyone paid closer attention to the ruling dynasty of Zhan than the Zhani, it was Kodamia.
“Thank you,” I said, “but there’s no need to worry about my returning it late. I don’t have the time to waste. If it’s all right with you, I’ll just park myself in the third-floor reading room I use as a foyer, and it’ll never leave the building.”