AntiHisTor is a world just a step aside from our own. Long Lives is the first set of ten short stories from that world. Each one usually runs to around 30 pages.
A new translation goes up on Substack every month - the first third of each story is free. Links appear here as each one is ready.
At the end of June the air came to a stop above the graveyard. The limes along the wall stood without moving, and over the wrought-iron gate hung the parish ring of black iron that nobody could remember being new. It was muggy. Half the district came and the old graveyard barely held them all.
Vera had known in advance how many would come. On Thursday evening, on the telephone, between two batches of open sandwiches, she arranged for the side gate to be opened specially, got the celebrant a second microphone, and told Aunt Klara to catch the old women from Bystra at the bus before they could get lost among the graves. Nobody noticed any of these small things. They were taken for granted as automatically as the fact that Vera would be there first.
The twins arrived ten minutes before the service. Mila with Adrian, in a dark blue car that parked itself for them. Renata alone, in a leased car that should have stopped being hers two months ago. They got out at opposite ends of the graveyard and met at the grave. Anyone seeing them for the first time would need a long while to make them out as twins, and would just shake their head over whatever strange force pulled them together and apart at once. Even here Mila wore a dress in a flower colour, though the colour of dried flowers, and hair that looked as if the wind had combed it after taking a course. Renata was dressed in black that was not mourning, because she wore black anyway, and in dark glasses. But here, of course, nobody was seeing them for the first time.
At the grave they stood side by side the way they had stood since they could stand: Mila half a step ahead, because she had been born twenty minutes earlier and had never let it go unmentioned, even through the years when not a word was said about it. Mila reached over and straightened Renata's collar. Renata let it be, processed it with three seconds of heavier breathing, and then stepped back among the others.
The village watched. Calendula and Tarantula - the names had started at school, back when the twins were the local stars: Mila for the bright colours and the smiles, Renata for the darker and more biting nature. Vera, four years younger, went without a nickname for a long time. When somebody did notice her and it clicked that she belonged to those famous twins, what came out of it was Spatula. It stuck to her until she left school. Mila still brings hers out in her courses as proof that a person can outgrow most things. Renata used hers for over twenty years as self-defence in the worst moments. Vera tries to be herself without a nickname.
What the village knew about Mila was that she made online courses teaching people to breathe and not to get upset, and that it was earning her a house with a garden outside Prague; the younger half of the village had her voice on their phones and played it while they did the ironing.
What it knew about Renata was that she had a little shop in Prague with rugs and bowls and teas from somewhere abroad, and that it was not going well - who had brought that into the village nobody knew, but everyone had heard somebody mention it.
Vera lived in the village where she was born and drove to her job at the library in Bensen. She was said to be a good girl, which in the mouths of those who said it was a kind and high-minded way of saying "it isn't her fault nobody wants her, look at her". What the village did not know was that every other Thursday she went to Prague for board games, to a club above a café where they greet her by name and where the same four people have sat at her table for eight years: Andre, who brings his own dice in a linen bag, Petra and Jakob, who are a couple and play against each other with all the more relish for it, and Hanna, who travels in from Kladen and always leaves ten minutes early for her connection. Nor that in the evenings she plays online with other friends from Brunn and Ostrau whom she has never seen in the flesh and who nonetheless sent her a parcel they had ordered between them for her birthday last year. She kept none of it secret; it was just that nobody asked.
The last time Vera had seen Renata was the year before last, at Mortmass at Mila's. After the second glass Renata had held forth about Roman, and Vera had allowed herself to let out a few long-suppressed remarks. After a not very veiled hint that the only person entitled to comment on other people's relationships was Renata herself, she left the rest unsaid and said no more about herself either. There was nothing to be gained by explaining, and no reason to defend herself against incomprehension on the other side. Renata went for her coat before Mila's cake had cooled. After that they wrote only at birthdays, Vera always first and Renata the day after. Last year Vera did not go to Mila's at all; and the traditional Mortmass gathering at their grandmother's was missed in turn by Renata.
The coffin stood on green baize and looked small. The whisper went round among the graves like a discovery: so small, isn't she. In her last years Rosara Gale had measured five foot one, only nobody remembered her that way; they remembered her at the desk with the typewriter, and there she had not been small. The celebrant spoke into the windless air and it carried over the bowed heads all the way to the back wall. On one wreath, propped a little to one side, the ribbon read In quiet remembrance - Heinrich. People gave it a wide berth and dutifully saved the juicier speculation for later.
The summary of Rosara's life sounded as sterile as funerals require: she was born, she married, she was widowed, she wrote all her life for other people, she raised a daughter, she outlived the daughter, she died at ninety-two, quietly, at home, in the armchair by the window, with an unfinished letter in the machine. "Ninety-two," the women by the wall whispered to one another. "That's an age, that is. You have to give her that." Only a few of the very oldest nodded more slowly and tried not to think that they could hardly count on a number like that themselves.
The mayor, holding the parish wreath ready, was looking forward to the wake more than to anything else, and broke into a sweat whenever he remembered that a few words were expected of him at the start of it. The firemen kept together out of habit, but had come without their uniforms, as the deceased had ordered through Vera. At the back by the wall stood the Simas from the bakery, both of them, without their daughter, and the village understood: after everything, they were hardly going to drag her round funerals.
For the third time since the service began, the phone buzzed in Renata's pocket. She knew who it was and that it was not a condolence. She kept her hand in her pocket, crushing the phone until it stopped vibrating, and looked out over the coffin towards the horizon, where the pale tower of the chateau rose above the woods. As a child she had thought the government lived there. Today her thoughts ran nearer the ground, and she was thinking about her grandmother's house below the hill: if it sold soon enough, there would be peace.
Mila cried beautifully. Entirely sincerely, and yet in a way that suited her, as always. Adrian stood half a step behind her holding her small handbag. It was the same as on every other occasion when the two of them appeared: Mila was there to be seen, and his job was mainly to be good at holding. His ground, the capital, his word. The pace, if it came to that.
Vera did not stand at the grave. She stood by the wall, from where she could see the celebrant, the side gate, Aunt Klara with the old women from Bystra, and the boy who was to start the music after the service. As the coffin went down she raised her eyes to the limes. Not a leaf.
A procession of wretches trudged across the grey forewinter country. They were hauling their rickety carts out of the hamlet of Birna - a handful of half-tumbledown cottages strung along the right bank of the river a little short of Karsvat - the way they always went before the Mortiny. Birna was made of paupers, allowed once a year to gather a little wood in the forest far beyond the castle, so that not quite all of them would freeze to death. Though they had only the one day, they set out slowly and deliberately in the morning, to save strength enough for the way back. And so they toiled on through the fog, and with every step of theirs the forest traded the scent of morning for the reek of death. A little way behind the train straggled a threesome that not even they cared to glance back at: a one-armed ruin of what had once been a man, his little girl, and a pig.
It would have been the year 1690, if anyone in this land outside the world had known how to write. Or count. It wasn't the last time this land would seal itself away, but it was, beyond doubt, for the longest. Long enough to lose its memory. Long enough for the rot to take its economy, its institutions, its bonds, and the plain will to live.
Three generations back, this proud land had celebrated a great victory. The expulsion of tyrants, and freedom of faith. Only the children of the victors found rather less to be proud of, and their own children often no longer believed there was any world outside at all. Everything had always been just the way it was now. Cold, grey the year round, without a trace of the divine except for the hollowed-out feast of the Mortiny in winter. Only a madman would believe that beyond the ramparts of forest and mountain lay anything but monsters and emptiness. It was only to children that anyone bothered to repeat the old wives' tale: that whoever crosses the seventh bridge loses his name. The grown-ups, of course, had long known that nowhere outside this land did anything better await. However loathsome it was to live here.
It doesn't begin cheerfully. And believe me - it's going to get much worse.
Adlina hopped in circles around the puddles, making up for the wearisome pace of the procession ahead of her and of her father. There was no friskiness or fun in those muddy splashes - only the last dregs of the strength Adlina had inherited from her mother. From the mother whose own strength had gone, for the most part, into bringing Adlina into the world, and who never got it back afterward. She might have recovered, might even have healed. But back then the father wasn't yet crippled, and gave her no peace until she was with child again. And then again. And after the third miscarriage she never got up. Even so, that wasn't what made him an outcast in Birna. Contempt came to him only with the injury. People ashamed that they can't help don't always prefer to look away. Sometimes they'd rather hide their shame behind a kick at someone defenceless.
Stop hopping about, you fool. You're splashing mud on me. And the pig will bolt.
Forgive me, Papa.
For as long as she could remember, he was the only one who had ever fed her. In her life that was the closest thing to any tenderness she'd known. He might treat her the way the others treated him, and still, to her, he was Papa - the one she'd learned from her earliest days to look after and to serve. There's no sense pretending he kept her for any other reason.
Even so, it's going to get much worse still.
But not yet - for now we're only a few steps behind the procession, which is slowly coming to a halt. Here is the forest where the outcasts are allowed to load onto their carts whatever they can break off the dead trees. A lucky few had an axe handed down from Tovan, the half-giant who lived between Birna and Karsvat. He lived there still, though by now he drove away from his forge anyone to whom owning a usable tool might bring envy, and death. Such was the good heart of that ancient scion of giants.
When the others had broken off all they could carry, and the train hunched itself back toward the road home, the father didn't let Adlina go with them. He pushed the pig's rope into her palm and jerked his chin toward the place where, past the last fence of the clearing, the real dark began among the spruces.
Acorns and beechmast. Let it feed while there's still any to be had. Through the winter no one will give us a thing.
Adlina knew how far into the forest she was allowed. No further than she could see from the path. In there were wolves, who in winter had no more to eat than people did, and bears not yet asleep. And beyond them, so it was said, things worse than wolves and bears. Those were spoken of only in whispers, and no one ever said what they were, because no one knew; it was enough that it worked on the children. Fear of the unnamed holds better than any fence. But the pig had to feed at least once, or by spring neither it nor they would live, and so the father sent his daughter where he wouldn't go himself.
At first everything went well. The pig rooted in the leaf-litter under the beeches, grunting contentedly, and Adlina shifted from foot to foot in the wet behind it. Then the beast lifted its snout, as if it had caught some scent, and before she could grip the rope tighter it gave a lurch and broke away up the slope. The rope slid through her palm and burned it raw. And Adlina, who had nothing in the world but her father and this pig, ran after it into places she was never meant to set foot.
She tore between the trunks, stumbling over roots, losing the grunting in the distance and always catching it again, until the forest muffled even that last sound at her back and around her there was only the damp cold and her own breath. The spruces stood denser here, and taller than by the path, their branches grown together into a ceiling no daylight came through - just a grey dusk, the same at morning as at noon. The snow between the roots never truly melted here. For the first time in her life Adlina stood in a place no one from Birna had ever set foot, and her body knew it before her head did - a chill ran through her that had nothing to do with the cold. Then she stopped, caught her breath, and looked around her among the trees.
Out of the hillside rose something that didn't belong there. Between the moss and the fallen trunks a spine of stone curved away, vertebra by vertebra, blocks laid in a line too straight for water or frost to have set them that way. Lichen had grown over them, the earth had half swallowed them, and yet at a glance you could tell someone had built it. A dead thing in the middle of a living forest. Adlina stood and stared and didn't understand, because there was nothing to understand: in her world nothing was built that outlasted a man, and this had lain here longer than the memory of anyone she knew.
The pig, meanwhile, rooted quite calmly at the foot of that row of stone, as though it had lain there forever. To the pig it was just another upturned root. For Adlina, right here - in the forbidden forest, at a nameless thing - something opened for the first time in her life: a thin crack in the world that had insisted, all her twelve years, that it was whole, and that it had always been so.
Newgate Prison · Tuesday, morning
It was not Detective Inspector Brightonfeld's day. He walked down a corridor that stank of damp brick and lamp tallow, kept his hat on his head, and in his hand, instead, held a sealed envelope whose contents had undone his entire career.
For forty years he had pursued the phantom thief known as Eleanor Atley-Nott. Though he was well aware this was not her real name, he preferred it outright to the romanticizing nickname the Queen of Fast Knives. He couldn't abide those who failed to take her deeds seriously enough and made a heroine of her, as if there were something admirable about her.
The hunt he had once taken up as a raw greenhorn was to have reached its climax yesterday. On the floor of a looted goldsmith's, back then, he had seen his first corpse, and in horror he had sworn not to let the culprit run free. For forty years, alongside no end of ordinary cases, he encountered the same handiwork again and again. Toward the close of his career he felt he knew Eleanor intimately, that he would know her by her walk or by the way she wiped a knife... yet he never had the chance to come anywhere near her, and still she eluded him.
Then a young clerk of the new Criminal Investigation Department, a certain Ashby, came to him at Bow Street. He laid before him a cabinet daguerreotype of a woman in a travelling costume, and beside it a column of figures. The picture was blurred and the figure in it had her face covered, but Brightonfeld looked at it for barely a quarter of a second and knew beyond the least doubt who this Clara Blackwell really was.
He set off at once with two parties of constables for the address given, where she was said to be living under that name. On the way he tried not to dwell on the disappointment that his nemesis had been run to ground not by honest detective work and shrewd judgement, but by some newfangled thing that used statistics, a metal rule, and who knew what other contrivances.
Though he had no doubt they were after the right person, he had a bad feeling the whole way. It defied understanding that a thief with such a history should live in a half-pauper quarter, in one of the flats usually kept by shirt-ironers and feeders of postal dogs.
More incomprehensible to Brightonfeld by far was the moment he had burst into her room with his pistol trained on her, and she had slowly turned. After four decades of searching he had expected a woman at least his own age. And now he beheld the face of a woman who looked no more than thirty.
So your wait paid off after all, boy?
She was smiling as he led her to the wagon, and as the grille clanged shut behind her.
Brightonfeld was beside himself with rage. Her condescension and her even gaze did not throw him; he was too seasoned a detective for that. But how young she looked drove him to madness.
Perhaps it would be the first documented case of Tithonus syndrome. Perhaps it would turn out that this Clara was carrying on something her mother had once practised. There had to be some explanation, but for Brightonfeld it was, at this moment, out of reach, and he knew for certain only what the data - and above all his own intuition - told him. It was her. Whatever lay behind her seeming youth.
The next morning he was preparing to question her when, on his way, he was stopped by two men from Whitehall, plainly of higher standing than Ashby, who handed him an envelope and briefly explained what it held.
Brightonfeld's resistance was less brief and to the point than their message, and just as useless. After fifteen minutes he gave up. He was perhaps one of the finest detectives in Londinum, but at bottom he was still nothing more than an ordinary copper. Into the world of politics he had no insight, and wanted nothing to do with it.
The warder unlocked the door, turned on his heel and walked back down the corridor without a glance at Brightonfeld.
Eleanor awaited him in a clean, tidy cell. Someone had brought her fresh clothes that morning, bright with colour instead of the prison grey, a comb, and perhaps even coffee, for a faint scent that did not belong here hung in the air. Eleanor sat at a narrow table by the wall, her hair gathered into a bun, her hands resting easily on the top. She looked like a lady who had just settled in her own drawing room and was expecting a caller.
Brightonfeld did not take off his hat here either.
He laid the envelope in the middle of the table, which someone had wiped down with unusual care. He left the monogrammed seal facing up.
This comes to you from Whitehall.
Shall I open it in front of you? Do you want to know what's inside?
I know there's an offer in it. What it is doesn't interest me.
She smiled again.
And yet there's something you'd like to know. Are you wondering what I did with all those valuables? Or why I let some of my victims live?
That I know. Over the years I've learned how your victims treated their families, what they had on their conscience... And the more loathsome the monster, the better the chance you'd do away with him in the act. Only you're neither police nor judge. You can't take justice into your own hands.
She looked at the envelope on the table.
Something tells me I rather can.
Shafts of light pierced the green wall of the beech forest. After the morning rain the sun had come out and split the world evenly into blue and green, though the air itself smelled of gold. Every drop that slid from a leaf reminded Hodana that spring had come to the Iron Mountains.
She wasn't afraid, she told herself. There was nothing to fear, she reminded herself, and her heart tightened all the same, the way the trees throttled the path ahead of her and behind her with every step.
The forest here was the same as at the edge, where she was used to going. The same trees, the same ferns, the same moss. Even so, now and then some startled animal would bolt up near her and be gone before Hodana could set down her other foot.
The last time Hodana had come this far she'd been a child, with her mother, after a root for her father's brew. She had pattered along at her mother's back and hadn't needed to know the way. Now she knew roughly where to go. Roughly was how everyone in Lískovec knew it. And in truth, they didn't even need that. Old Hýsa, Hýsa of the forest, mostly turned up on her own when someone had need of her. Then she would vanish again, and everyone assured one another that they had thanked her well enough and wouldn't go troubling her. Behind the tact and the respect for her privacy they hid a fear that Hodana could not afford today. If they waited for Hýsa to come again unbidden, it might be too late.
Hýsa sat on a stump in front of her cottage and watched the girl struggling up the path below. Three times already today she'd had to steer her. Each time at a different spot, each time with a dry twig dropped under her feet or a stone that slid down just so, to bar her from a wrong turning. If the chit meant to pester her today, she could at least not keep her waiting till evening.
She knew the charcoal-burner's daughter from far off, as she would have known any child from Lískovec and the other hamlets. Though this Hodana was scarcely a child anymore, and Hýsa wondered whether something had slipped past her. Might that be the very reason the girl had come? It was April. The girl was in for a tough time, if she was to give birth in winter.
A raven flew across the clearing and settled on a smaller stump a little way from Hýsa. He tried to gabble something, but on finding this wouldn't do with a visitor approaching, he merely performed one of their agreed-upon gestures and went on his way.
Hýsa nodded and felt for the medallion beneath the layers of her ancient but carefully kept clothes. So it had been the charcoal-burner's son yesterday after all. Now it made sense.
She stretched her stiff hands and glanced for a moment at the dwelling behind her. The cottage was sunk into the rock face like a broken tooth in a gum, one side of stone, the other of roughly hewn beams. She felt she would have to leave it. After yesterday, more keenly than before. And today she had begun to sense exactly why. Once it comes out that the herb-woman truly works magic, the neighbours' respect and shyness turn into something to be wary of. For their own safety.
The path opened onto a circular clearing and Hodana stopped so abruptly that only then did she realize how she'd hurried over the last stretch. Before her stood the cottage in the rock, and on a stump by the door sat an old woman.
So this was how Hýsa of the forest looked at home. She was different from the way she appeared in the village. Here she seemed calmer, and at the same time like someone doing you a kindness merely by taking note of your presence.
Hýsa had been old back when Hodana's mother was a child, and the village said she had been old for as long as anyone could remember. But in those days that was said of anyone who managed to make it past forty. Her face was dry like the bark of an old beech, grey hair under her kerchief. Yet when she rose slowly, the movement was as fluid and smooth as poured milk. She looked at Hodana with silver-grey eyes that did not belong in that old face at all. As though they'd strayed by some madness into the wrong body.
What do you want.
Hýsa always put her questions so they sounded like orders. That much Hodana was ready for.
My brother's got a fever. He's been raving since yesterday.
Raving how.
He cries out in his sleep about caves. About passages in the stone. About a beast with a great head. He says words no one understands.
Hýsa turned and went into her dwelling, so that her small visitor wouldn't see her face for the moment she now needed. It was worse than she'd feared. Far more had leaked out.
Over the city spread the blue-black of the moments just before night ends. The hour you have to know the city to recognise - to sense that somewhere out of sight it has already begun to stir. This city on the Danube never slept, of course. The coming chill of morning only stiffened it into a slower pace and let at least those who had no reason to rush at daybreak catch their breath.
Viktor Brenn was never one to hurry, certainly not as he rode the lift down from the topmost third of the tower and prepared to cross the bridge at his leisure, to leave the view of glittering prisms behind on the far side and lose himself in the lanes of the older part of town. But first he had to get past the river, hidden beneath banks of mist. Today he felt he had more than earned that soothing sight. He had spent twelve hours staring into the power-grid logs of the northern circuit to crack a three-percent anomaly, and in the end, just before his boss arrived, he had managed it.
He could drop the night's results triumphantly, if wearily, beside her morning coffee and clear out with that bombshell at his back. That was how it went: Viktor would do anything to dodge routine work, even if it meant digging up the dullest possible task, whenever no case in his speciality happened to turn up.
In the end the data always yielded up something everyone else had missed, and so he could justify his existence at the firm all over again. Every rank-and-file operator knew it was so. They all knew their incident-management firm owed half its survival to Viktor and his creative approach to interpreting the rules - and the terms of his contract along with them. And still they all resented him, muttering something about how Dana let him get away with everything for reasons other than economic ones. There is no environment on earth richer in gossip than an ops room peopled by mediocre young men convinced they are meant for better things and that the world has wronged them.
A three-percent discrepancy was within tolerance. But a constant deviation of that size was strange. While Viktor stayed put at the computers all night, a team of field technicians, acting on his tip, set about checking the physical infrastructure and found that one of the transformers on the third circuit had a faulty sensor. It reported the correct values while the real load kept climbing. Left unrepaired, within two months it would have overloaded and blacked out the whole district.
It was not one of the more adventurous cases, but public money always flowed with less reluctance than that of private clients. Traffic control centres, the emergency service, the power grid, the waterworks. That kept the firm afloat in stretches when no one-off, more lucrative project was anywhere on the horizon. And even from such colourless data Viktor could strike a spark of something that at least threatened to become a crisis - and so avert it.
He walked, out of habit, though today he wished he were home already. The mind always wilts as night ends, no matter how long one has been awake. Whether you rise at midnight or at noon, around five in the morning the body simply switches over and something has to end. And today, on top of that, the sheer number of figures he had double-checked had worn him down.
He expected no gratitude for another small rescue, not from the city that sprawled for miles around him, nor from his colleagues. He had ignored the two men he had shared the lift with moments earlier. And yet now, in the cold, something clicked in his head and he recalled what an unusual subject of conversation those two seemed to have had. The WOW signal? Who drags that out again after sixty-odd years, or however long it's been?
Viktor had the impression that between those two - who off the clock could rarely manage a topic rising much above basic physiological needs - the word "civilisation" had also drifted by. Extraterrestrial, presumably, given the context. But never mind. He was finally outside now, with a week off ahead of him. Perhaps, just this once, at the tail end of winter like this, he might get away somewhere out of the city.
Halfway across the bridge Viktor dug a pair of earphones out of his pocket. He could not keep to his resolution to spend the walk without any further distractions, wrapped in nothing but the murmur of the waking traffic around him. All that remained was to decide whether to put on music, or...
The music started before his phone had even finished pairing with the earphones, and his boss's face appeared on the display. Viktor sighed. Partly at the fact that someone wanted something from him. Partly at the reminder that he still did not know why he had given half a minute of his life to assigning that photo to her contact. He ought to delete it.
You'll thank me after my holiday, boss.
Come back.
The thanks will do just fine in the form of a rai-
Come. Back.
Is something off in the data?
No. We have a case.
At five in the morning? It must be something on par with a bank robbery. Can't this wait for someone who isn't already thirty minutes into his holiday?
Believe me, your holiday is going to go very differently from what you expected.
We're closing in on the icy city in the mountains. We fly over the edge of the snowbound forest, and far ahead a cluster of stately towers is already visible at its center, though there's still a stretch of smaller temples, murmuring marketplaces, and monumental aqueducts between us and them. Rem is the largest city in the world, and you can sense it from its most famous squares down to its remotest alleys. Not least because its inhabitants have little idea what goes on beyond their peninsula on the continent, let alone in the rest of the world.
The Remans are too proud to give any deeper thought to what happens outside the city of cities, or even outside the empire above all empires. And from up here it's no wonder; the city stretches for dozens of miles from the coastline all the way up to Albacan, the pontifex's white-marble seat set inside an extinct volcano. From the air, all you see are the polished fruits of this civilization - not the millions of hours of labor that were sacrificed for them without any claim to reward, or even to dignity.
We've left the insula tenements and the clattering workshops far below us, and the smoke from their chimneys has given way to clean steam. It rises from steam pipes and from the heated ribbing of balconies, it wreathes the walkways that link the arabaroque turrets, and here and there it makes the astrolabe garlands on the copper cupolas tremble. This part of the city looks like one great steam engine, pressurized by the indecision of whether to finally launch into the sky or simply explode.
We descend, slowing into a turn. We pass the most important temple of Albacan: the blindingly white Templum Circulare. Its enormous crystal Annulus is set into the tympanum above the main entrance. We sweep close past the extended presbytery and a truly massive obelisk-belfry. These dimensions exist for the sole purpose of exalting the importance of this holy place. They certainly have nothing to do with the inner lives of the successive pontiffs who oversaw its construction over several decades.
We carry just enough speed to circle the tallest tower of Rem and of Albacan: the Turris Borealis. In the final phase of the flight, we are descending so steeply that we almost trace the slope of the snow-covered staircase winding around the exterior of the tower. At its foot, we come to a halt, right in front of the wide-eyed face of the young, half-frozen novice Melco.
After an hour of waiting, Melco is aching to the bone with cold and hunger, and he might even be angry if he could feel anger through all the fear. The wait had felt like an eternity, and at the same time, it was unbelievable that not even twelve hours had passed since the prior had come to tell him he had been chosen for a task by Archprefect Altorius himself. Father Altorius was one of the highest-ranking churchmen, and, according to what people said, only the pontifex stood above him. Until yesterday, Melco wouldn't have dared so much as speak to him if he had somehow turned up in the same wing of the cloister. And now Melco was waiting for him in the frost, and only sacred dread kept him from cursing the man.
Are you ready?
Melco flinched. He turned slowly. Even though he was standing a step above Altorius, he had to lift his head to look at him. And lowered it again at once. In his threadbare habit, he felt smaller and smaller next to Altorius's gleaming blue cloak, thrown over a coal-black robe of heavy felted wool. It was as if a piece of the night sky had fallen into the city of snow and was being held to the ground only by a pair of heavy leather boots.
Can you not speak? They haven't sent me a mute, surely.
I-I'm sorry, F-father. I'm fro-zen.
It was true, but even somewhere warm, Melco would have had no idea how one was supposed to greet an archprefect. Presumably, one ought to pick the most reverent and most formal mode of speech to convey the proper respect and, at the same time, not look like a country bumpkin - which, in truth, was exactly what he was.
In the shadow of the center and beneath the light of the rim-
-spare me the drivel! We're not here for ceremonies. Come on, we've a great deal of walking ahead of us.
Melco had enough sense not to apologize. He fell silent and obediently scrambled up the steps, up which Altorius seemed to glide.
The novice, stiff with cold but slowly warming with the movement, wondered which floor they might be heading to. Surely they couldn't be going all the way…
You didn't have to wait outside, boy, just because I was running late. I know you were eyeing the entrance to the archive. Am I right?
The first few floors of Turris Borealis served as the archive, and Melco had in fact been thinking of asking the kindly old archivist on the ground floor for temporary refuge. He would no doubt have been allowed to stand by a window - the old man would certainly have minded less than that stern, gaunt monk in charge of the first floor. Not to mention the second. It seemed that the higher the level of the archive, the less humanity its keeper retained, consumed by their sheer passion for books, scrolls, and tablets.
Y-yes, sir.
I have no use for an assistant who stays put wherever he is placed and has no mind of his own. I'll take it, then, that you were held back by shyness, and not by want of wit. Am I right?
Y-yes-
Are you still frozen, or are you stammering?
I'm fro-z- it's better now, Father.
Good. And stop calling me Father after every sentence. We'll be spending a great deal of time together; otherwise I'll soon start feeling as though your mother is waiting for me at home.
Melco sensibly chose not to answer. But then he felt compelled to speak up after all.
I haven't got a mother. Just… so you know.
Altorius stopped and turned to him.
I know, boy. They brought you to Albacan when your house burned down with your parents in it. You were too small to be left on your own, and there were too many hungry mouths in that wretched Adsone for anyone to want to take you in. And by some miracle you could read, which is why at the age of seven you ended up in the largest cloister, and not somewhere on the edge of Rem. Isn't that right?
Melco only nodded, but his expression clearly said how the hellum can you know that?
I would hardly have some random brat sent to me without knowing anything about him - you might have figured that out. Look.
Altorius nodded towards the Templum Circulare. For a moment, Melco stopped being hypnotized by the cloak and looked. From this side of the tower, he had a view straight onto the temple's façade, and the largest Annulus in the world was just then alight with the rising sun. All twelve sigils blazed against the surrounding snow and ice so fiercely that their shapes were entirely obscured. It was like twelve suns, twelve stars, and together they made up a circle so unearthly bright that none of the twelve gods could ever doubt the pure faith of their servants here. And the whole endeavor, too, had come at a decidedly un-circular price.
In all his eight years here, Melco had never been granted this sight, because at this hour he was always indoors, having to sing with the others. And now the singing carried all the way up here, and it was as if someone had caught his thoughts in their hand, torn them out of his head, and filled the empty space with those sacred verses.
Ex nocte alta surgimus, vox pura ducit nos in plus,
per aether claras ascendit, chorus fidelis in arcus.
In orbe sacro vivimus, lux rotas movet in sinus,
pactum aeternum canimus, de duodecim sigillis - annulus.
This was the season when the freshest batch of novices learned to cheekily drop the "L" from the last word of the chant, and so a heartfelt "Annu-us" rang out from the square across all of Rem. A few unfortunates picked out at random would be enjoying hours of kneeling without supper today, but that was already part of the tradition.
