“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.
And try as I might, I could not sift the truth from what I’d read. All of the accounts cited the same series of events: the weakening of the world, in which every living thing from forests to strong young men had grown ill and begun to die. The three-day storm. The shattering and re-formation of the sun. On the third day the skies had gone quiet, and Itempas appeared to explain the new order of the world.
What was missing were the events leading up to the war. Here I could see the priests had been busy, for I could find no descriptions of the gods’ relationship prior to the war. There were no mentions of customs or beliefs in the days of the Three. Those few texts that even touched on the subject simply cited what Bright Itempas had told the first Arameri: Enefa was instigator and villain, Nahadoth her willing coconspirator, Lord Itempas the hero betrayed and then triumphant. And I had wasted more time.
Rubbing my tired eyes, I debated whether to try again the next day or just give up altogether. But as I mustered my strength to get up, something caught my eye. On the ceiling. I could see, from this angle, where two of the bookcases joined to form the column. But they were not actually joined; there was a gap between them perhaps six inches wide. Puzzled, I sat up and peered closer at the column. It appeared as it always had, a set of huge, heavily laden bookcases arranged back-to-back in a rough circle, joined tight with no gaps.
Another of Sky’s secrets? I got to my feet.
The trick was amazingly simple, once I took a good look. The bookcases were made of a heavy, dark wood that was naturally black in color—probably Darren, I guessed belatedly; once upon a time we’d been famous for it. Through the gaps I could see the backs of the other bookcases, also blackwood. Because the edges of the gaps were black, and the backs of the bookcases were black, the gaps themselves were all but invisible, even from a few steps away. But knowing the gaps were there…
I peered through the nearest gap and saw a wide, white-floored space corraled by the bookcases. Had someone tried to hide this space? But that made no sense; the trick was so simple that someone, probably many someones, must have found the inner column before. That suggested the goal was not to conceal, but to misdirect—to prevent casual browsers and passersby from finding whatever was within the column. Only those who knew the visual trick was there, or who spent enough time looking for information, would find it.
The old woman’s words came back to me. If one knows the knowledge is tainted in the first place… Yes. Plain to see, if one knew something was there to find.
The gap was narrow. I was grateful for once to be boy-shaped, because that made it easy to wriggle between the shelves. But then I stumbled and nearly fell, because once I was inside the column, I saw what it truly hid.
And then I heard a voice, except it wasn’t a voice, and he asked, “Do you love me?”
And I said, “Come and I will show you,” and opened my arms. He came to me and pulled me hard against him, and I did not see the knife in his hand. No, no, there was no knife; we had no need of such things. No, there was a knife, later, and the taste of blood was bright and strange in my mouth as I looked up to see his terrible, terrible gaze…
But what did it mean that he made love to me first?
I stumbled back against the opposite wall, struggling to breathe and think around blazing terror and inexplicable nausea and the yawning urge to clutch my head and scream.
The final warning, yes. I am not usually so dense, but you must understand. It was a bit much to deal with.