Mr. Stitch (11 page)
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.
“Welcome to the Black Library,” the man said. “Ectoplasmatics are numbered 300 through 800, right hand corner over there.”
“Wait…wait. What is this?”
The adjunct looked at him skeptically. “This is the Black Library. It’s where we put all the heretical documents so no one can read them. We’ve been filling it up for…oh, about nine hundred years now, I think.”
“All of this?”
“Oh, sure. I imagine a lot of it’s pretty repetitive, though. I remember, the church found a great cache of books about chimerastry a few years back, and most of them were just attempts to recreate Shandor’s sixteenth.”
“His sixteenth what?”
“Pamphlet. He wrote twenty-two, I think, about all sorts of things. Five of them are heretical—fifteen through twenty. The last two were about waterwheels.”
“What did the heretical ones say?”
The adjunct harrumphed importantly and fiddled with his belt. “Well, I don’t know, do I? They’re heresy. I never read them.”
“Then how did you know the ones that you found were heresy?”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, they said what they were doing right in the title. Besides that, the church has people look through them. Never more than a page at a time. Then, they give a summary to the Bishop, and the Bishop reads all the summaries and decides whether or not there’s heresy. That way, no one actually reads the whole thing. Look are you going to look through this stuff or not? I can get in a lot of trouble for bringing you down here.”
Valentine dismissed his concerns with a wave of his hand, as he threaded through the shelves towards the ectoplasmatics section. “Aren’t you worried? About me reading this stuff?”
The adjunct shrugged. “I don’t suppose. I mean, if we can’t trust the Coroners to know what heresy is, who can we trust?”
This was a valid point, and one that Valentine could not dispute. In fact, it led him to some serious questions as to why, as a coroner, he hadn’t been required to read all of this material in the first place. It was surely no wonder that thousands of heretics were constantly operating directly under the noses of Beckett and his fellow inspectors when they had only the barest idea of what to look for.
Something
, Valentine thought,
to bring up with Stitch. Maybe he could read them all, and at least print up a bunch of notes for us to look at?
Valentine could not recall having read more than the most skeletal descriptions of the thirteen heretical sciences, and what kinds of things precisely counted.
It was all in one pamphlet, with a number of columns. “Healing the sick,” for example, was in the “acceptable” column. “Raising the dead” was in the “heretical” column.
The ectoplasmatics section of the Library was arranged ostensibly alphabetically, but more than three quarters of the books, papers, quartos, folios, and scrolls were anonymously attributed, and so the bulk of the material was arranged by date of confiscation. This was more than a little confusing, because a late date of confiscation didn’t necessarily indicate a late date of creation. There were a number of dirty, weathered rolls of vellum that had to date back to Agon Diethes’ time, but which hadn’t been discovered until 1808—and so they were shelved more recently than a pamphlet that had been seized in 1788 and couldn’t have been more than a year old when it was picked up.
Valentine looked at the daunting array of material and sighed. Hundreds of confiscated books, along with probably ten times that many executions, and the stupid bastards
kept writing them
. How many centuries of history does it take for men to finally give up on something?
“Well,” he said aloud, as he ran his finger lightly along the volumes. “Of course they’re crazy. That’s why they’re heretics.” He found a fat black volume, brought to the Black Library during the 17
th
century, and drew it out. It was in an old-fashioned Sarpejk dialect that Valentine found he could read tolerably well, and he sat down to muddle through it.
It was only an hour or two before he gave up, and turned back to the shelves, looking for something else. He found a pamphlet from only half a century ago and breezed through it, looking for key words or phrases, jotting down notes when he was of a mind. He continued this process—picking a book at random and skimming it, trying to just get some idea of what ectoplasmatic texts were
supposed
to look like, for the better part of the day.
Valentine had been chewing one particularly tough text in Old Middle Thranc—lost in a tangle of increasingly-obscure descriptors that he couldn’t determine were bad metaphor, a secret code, anagogic theology, or just a peculiarity of 15
th
century Thranc grammar—when the adjunct rushed back into the room, face ruddy and panicked.
“Mr. Vie-Gorgon. Inspector. Sir,” he said, gasping for breath. “They sent…your driver sent…sent me.” He gasped again. “They need you. In Red Lanes. There’s been…an incident.”
“
So, I’ve been reading this stuff,” Valentine was saying, but Beckett wasn’t really listening. “Some of it, you know, not too much, because then, well, it’s just complicated isn’t it?”
They were in the dining room of the Hotel Jaise, which offered a bill of fare that would have been fantastically intimidating to anyone except for Valentine, who immediately began to proceed through all five courses of dinner. Beckett picked at some kind of complicated fish plate—some intricate arrangement of smoked fishes and pickled fruits, slathered with a tangy, reddish-brown sauce whose origins the old coroner couldn’t place. Rich, the way they made all the sauces in Sar-Sarpek these days, but spicier. Probably another Corsay transplant.
Beckett forced his attention back to Valentine, whose explanation was only interrupted for the length of time it took him to shovel some delicious new morsel into his mouth, at a speed that must have made actually tasting the food impossible, and was no doubt a great insult to the chef. “…mmmfgh. Anyway, look, the old books, the ones in the Abbey library? They’re a mess. Every last one of them. I mean, I didn’t read every one of them. But all the ones I looked at, and I think it’s a safe bet that no one really knows what they’re talking about. They can’t…” he swallowed a spoonful of fruit concoction. “…mggh. Can’t make up their mind, I mean, whether they’re trying to talk in a secret code and just
allude
to what they mean, or if they’re giving instructions, or what. I mean, we know that ectoplasmatics is a science, right, but none of the ectoplasmatists seem to know it. Like the science is just an accidental…” he had some more fruit. “This is really good, by the way. Tart, a little sweet, but smooth. Sorry. Right, the science is just an accident of the religious stuff. They’re doing science, but they
think
they’re praying, you know what I mean?”
Gorud was watching Valentine intently, but Beckett had no idea whether or not the therian understood him. How smart were they? The coroner knew that he tended to think of them like children. Or else, to think of them as they appeared: unusually intelligent monkeys. But being smarter than a monkey wasn’t the same thing as being as smart as a person. Therians could speak all different languages, Beckett recalled, but they couldn’t read. Is it possible to be intelligent but illiterate?