Arcanum Part 25

"Incapacitated. Under-librarian Grozer is critically injured, and we are attempting to affect a cure ourselves in the absence of the Order. Under-librarian Thomm is missing, and has been since before the crisis. I and the other librarians have kept the library safe, no thanks to you, and now I come here to offer what appears to be some badly needed assistance. I am a servant of the library, and the library is the servant of the prince, Mayor. If you want him to return and find the council running and squawking like ready-for-the-pot chickens, so be it. He will not find the library like that. Do you have any proposals for dealing with this current situation, or should I seek both help and wisdom elsewhere?" Thaler straightened his back and folded his arms.

"Out," said the mayor. But when Thaler stuck his chin out and planted his feet anew, he explained his instruction. "Not you, Under-librarian. The rest of you, you useless, fawning, simpering, purblind idiots."

Consternation spread through the room, and Messinger span on his heel to confront his coterie.

"Out, you arseholes, you shitsacks, out!" He stamped and balled his fists and roared with a volume that belied his stature.

One by one, they left, shocked, wordless, until it was just the mayor and Thaler.

"Close. The. Door." A hand snaked back in and pulled the door tight shut. Messinger fell arse-first into a chair. "Gods, what a mess."

Thaler, surprised by the turn of events, looked around the mayor's chambers. They were richly furnished: the finest carpentry, the best tapestries, exquisite metalwork, and a cabinet of curios and gifts from across Europe. Very different from his own cell in the library complex. His gaze eventually alighted on a silver jug.

"Drink?"

"Gods, yes." The mayor put his head in his hands.

Thaler poured them both a generous measure of wine, and assumed he could sit down. He pushed the goblet in front of Messinger and sipped at his own. Very easy on the palate.

"Things are not as grim as they seem, Mayor."

"They're not? The lights our craftsmen use to work in the hours of darkness have gone out. We cannot produce goods. Ploughs will not cut the sod. We cannot grow food. The barges can travel downstream, but not back up. The wagons refuse to roll. Trade trade we can tax is ruined. Our drinking water has stopped flowing." The mayor snatched at his wine and sank half of it.

"I do appreciate that all these problems have landed on your desk, not mine, Master Messinger. We can still grow food, make things and send them to market: it might just be more difficult." Thaler's wine was too good to drink quickly, so he sipped at it again. "Has the Order offered any explanation for the hiatus in magical activity?"

Messinger shook his head. "No. No one's heard from them. And yes, I have asked around."

"Ah," said Thaler, raising his index finger, "but has anyone gone and asked the Order directly?"

"Are you mad? They'd as soon turn you inside out than bother talking with the likes of us." The mayor spluttered and swilled the remaining half of his wine before looking around for more. "No one needs to see your insides."

"I intend to go up Goat Mountain anyway, and I want you to come with me."

"Gods, man." The mayor leant forward into Thaler's face to make his point even more direct. "They'll kill you in ways you can't even begin to imagine. Possibly more than once."

"Rubbish. If they could resurrect people, they'd have done it to the prince's first wife. I don't think that's the only limit to their powers, either." Thaler leant back in his chair which was, like the wine, really very fine. "I don't think they can do anything any more."

The mayor blinked rapidly, and finally said: "What?"

Thaler raised his goblet and inspected the workmanship. "Nothing like this up at the library, Master Messinger. We're very much a beer-and-bread sort of crowd."

Messinger bit at his lip, his jaw trembling. "I will send a crate of my best wine to the library if you explain what in Midgard you are talking about."

"Excellent. A deal." The librarian sat upright and put his cup down, the better to wave his hands around. "Now, it strikes me that we mere mortals have been left in a quandary: do we sit around and wait for the Order to ride out of their tower and recast all the spells that have suddenly and mysteriously failed all at once, at the very same moment which means we have to do nothing except appear suitably grateful and hand over even more of our hard-earned cash or is this a permanent and irreversible occurrence which the hexmasters were powerless to prevent and are just as powerless to, er, reverse?"

"And you propose to go and ask them?"

"Yes," said Thaler.

"Despite the long-held convention that setting foot on Goat Mountain is punishable by death?"

"Yes."

The mayor considered matters for a moment, before getting up to collect the pitcher of wine himself and pour both of them another brimful each. "You are mad."

"At first sight, yes, my intention does appear a little foolish, but hear me out." Thaler slurped the top of his wine off without removing it from the table. "We don't know what to do without that information. If I have to reopen the library with no magical lights, I need to make other provisions spending the next fifty years, or however long I live, blundering around in the dark and not being able to read a word indoors seems to me a fool's errand. You don't know what alternative arrangements you need to make regarding the passage of trade: if we have to revert to horse-drawn carts as the Romans did, or some of the barbarians do now, we're going to need many more horses. I'm not an expert in horse husbandry, but I'm led to believe that the process is not instantaneous."

"But what has that got to do ...?"

Thaler held up his hand. "Please, Mr Messinger. What we do now, this day and the days following, will affect everything that happens hereafter. If we sit around on our ample backsides, waiting for the Order to come and rescue us, and they don't, we will have a situation far more serious than the one we face now. There is nothing for it. Someone will have to go up to the tower and find out. If they don't return, I suppose that is an answer of sorts."

Messinger guzzled at his wine again. "Yes, I understand that. Have you considered the third option?"

"A third?" Thaler looked pensive.

"That the Order have done this deliberately, and they want to watch us fail."

"It's possible. I've very good reasons for believing that I'm right, though."

"And ..." said Messinger. He looked at the dribble of red left in the bottom of his goblet, and decide it was better inside him than not "...you're willing to risk your life on that?"

"Yes, Mayor Messinger. I am." Thaler needed a clear head. No more vintage for him. He picked up the seal and toyed with it a moment before putting it back down on the ledger. "If I don't come back, I'll be grateful if you could return these to the library."

Thaler stood up, straightened his robes, and walked to the door. He paused.

"Aren't you going to wish me luck?" he asked.

"Fuck it," said Messinger. He drank the rest of Thaler's wine, and got unsteadily to his feet. "Come on, then. Before I change my mind."

27.

Sophia didn't cover her hair because she wasn't married, but she wasn't certain that she would have done so even if she were. Her hair was long and dark and only slightly curly, which meant that she could plait it into all kinds of interesting weaves such as the German girls wore, but that were forbidden to Jewish girls.

Well, not forbidden as such. It was frowned on, and Sophia had been frowned on a lot as a child. Her mother, when she was alive, had been desperate for her to fit in, because Sophia was such an odd daughter, more interested in her father's books than her mother's cooking.

She'd said often, to anyone willing to listen that husbands went to those girls who showed they kept a good house, not to those who could bisect a line or recite the opening stanzas of The Iliad. It turned out that Sophia's mother was right.

Being Aaron Morgenstern's daughter didn't help: he was a bad influence on her, indulging her when he should have been disciplining her. She was the bane of the local matchmakers, headstrong and contrary. She was, in short, a disgrace to her family.

She kept a good house all the same. Even though her father had given away, or lent, or something or other, all her oil lights and almost all of her candle lanterns to Mr Thaler's librarians, their windows had remained lit last night, and there had still been enough light to cook and sew and read.

Sophia called up the stairs. "Father, I'm going to see if the market has anything left."

"No, you're not. You're going out to be nosey and to get the latest gossip," came the faint reply. "No good will come of it."

"I'll tell you everything when I get back." She threw a shawl over her shoulders and unlatched the door. Her immediate neighbours, left, right and opposite, were gathered around the Rosenbaums' front step.

"Good morning, Mr Rosenbaum, Mr Schicter, Mr Eidelberg." She gave a little curtsey and remembered to reach back around her own door for the basket hanging there.

"Good morning, Sophia," said Rosenbaum. "Tell me again when I'm going to get my lamps back?"

"I don't know, Mr Rosenbaum. I'm sure the library will only need them for a short while." She pulled the door shut and looked down at the ground, then thought she didn't really need to do that, so she looked up and smiled. "I'll go and ask for you."

Rosenbaum wasn't used to any woman other than his wife smiling at him, and even that was rarely. "It wouldn't be proper for a Jewess," he said.

"You go and ask them, then." The rules about what she should do were more rules about what she couldn't do and, by the prophets, the list was already long enough without the Beth Din adding to them monthly. "If you think it's not proper for me to do so."

"A good Jew cannot set foot inside that place, Sophia. You know that."

"Perhaps you can stand outside and shout, then. Really." She stamped her foot. "I don't know why you bother talking to me, Mr Rosenbaum, if all you're going to do is find new ways to show me how much of a sinner I am."

She shouldn't rise to the bait, but she rarely resisted the temptation. Rosenbaum folded his arms across his chest and looked content, his thin beard wagging. Even though she was only just younger than he was than all three of the men, in fact, and he'd been suggested as a possible match for her she had to call him Mr Rosenbaum now he was married.

And she, unmarried, was still just Sophia.

She didn't have any answer to their sniping. It made her sad, and not a little bitter. So she left to the sound of their laughter and headed up Jews' Alley to the market in Scale Place. As she passed each door, she named the people who lived there not all Jews dwelt in Jews' Alley, but everyone who lived in Jews' Alley was a Jew. She knew them all, and they knew her.

That used to be a blessing, but she'd started to see it differently. She didn't hate any of them. She didn't even find much to dislike about most of them. Everything, though, was all crammed in on this one narrow street with its high houses and thin walls, and it was very claustrophobic.

Books opened the world to her in a way life could never do.

The market was busy. It was busy with non-Jews, which was unusual, and some of them were poking at the kishke and the gelfilte fish with undisguised curiosity. Others were trying to buy hamantaschen without recognising their significance, and having to have the whole of Purim patiently explained to them. She didn't really need anything else, as she'd already done the shopping first thing; the disaster that had befallen the Germans had only partially affected them.

The water that was the main thing. A Jewish household placed a bucket under the waterspout, and the women dipped from the bucket. As with her father's off-hand use of the barges to transport his books, they could claim they were getting their water from the bucket, not from the magically pumped spout.

Water for washing, for purification, for cooking. It was a concern. Perhaps it would come on again soon. Apart from this, though, Jewish boys pushed their handcarts through the streets, and sold vegetables brought to Juvavum from Jewish villages by donkey, just as they always had.

Sophia wandered around, trying to overhear what her German neighbours were saying, but in the end gave up and carried her empty basket down to the quayside.

She was surprised by the number of militiamen present, as she hadn't seen any in the upper part of the town, and even more surprised to find Mr Thaler in the company of the mayor, being marched towards the bridge by a company of spear-brandishing soldiers. They came towards her, the unmistakable shape of Thaler hurrying along the best he could, his black robe flapping behind him, and the mayor looking decidedly bilious, but more or less in step with the librarian.

She hurried too, apologising to those she bumped into as she trotted along towards the bridge approaches. "Mr Thaler," she called, "is everything all right?"

He didn't ignore her, but neither did he stop. "Good morning, Miss Morgenstern. Tell your father I will be along later to thank him for the lanterns."

"We'll be in the synagogue later, Mr Thaler. It's the ..." but she wasn't sure that Thaler would know what a Megillah reading was, let alone when it should be. "We won't be at home."

"No matter," he said. He drew level with her, and he smiled tightly in her direction. "Another time. Tomorrow." He seemed very determined, and she realised that he wasn't under arrest, but actually in charge.

Which, for an under-librarian, was a startlingly abrupt promotion.

"Mr Thaler, what's going on?"

Now Thaler had to look over his shoulder to talk to her. "That, Miss Morgenstern, is exactly what we're going to find out."

On they strode, though striding didn't quite describe either Thaler's rolling gait or the mayor's furious little steps. Those townsfolk who were on the bridge moved aside to let them pass, and, on nothing more than a whim, Sophia decided that she wanted to see where they were going.

That wasn't quite true: at some point, she'd have to atone for all those small lies that she knowingly told herself to justify her actions. She knew where they were going to Goat Mountain and the novices' house, which was the only legitimate point of contact between the Order of the White Robe and everybody else. She knew why they were going to ask about the fountains, the lights and the barges. She also knew that the Jews would be the last to be told the answers, as they were last to be told about anything that happened in Juvavum.

Perhaps, just this once, her community could be as well-informed as the Germans. Even take part in the conversation as to what happened next.

The soldiers swept past, rattling and chinking, and she waited for a moment to allow a reasonable distance to develop between them and her, before walking out into the middle of the roadway and over the bridge. Her empty basket banged against her side, but she tried to make everything look as natural as possible. Perhaps she was on her way to the makers' market on the far side. Or to collect some herbs, or just travelling to one of the farms on the outskirts of town.

She breezed across, worried that someone might turn around and order her away, but that never happened and, realistically, was never going to happen. Thaler and the mayor were intent on their task, and the soldiers grimly set to escort them, despite their better judgement. No one else cared what the unattached Jewish girl was doing, and it was just her guilty conscience that worried at her.

Thaler's group took the road to the novices' house and didn't stop anywhere on the tree-lined avenue. They carried on to the very end of the short, paved road and, having dodged from trunk to trunk, Sophia watched the mayor gesture sharply at the huge knocker on the tall recessed door.

Thaler wiped his brow and considered the architecture with his hands on his hips, taking in the short square tower, the high-pitched roofs, the grey stone walls. Then he stepped forward into the shadow of the doorway, and hammered out three sonorous knocks.

Sophia ducked back when Thaler turned around to talk to the mayor. When she re-emerged, they had already moved away from the novices' door. But not towards her; down the road to Juvavum.

They were taking the forbidden path to the next building up the hill.

It was as if she were watching her father tuck into a juicy pork chop and relish every mouthful. What they were doing was so incredibly transgressive that she couldn't quite believe it, even though she saw it with her own eyes. For a moment, she forgot how to breathe.

She clung to the tree-trunk until she could trust herself not to faint. The last of the soldiers disappeared from view as far as she was concerned, forever and she was alone.

Looking around, everything was perfectly still, and nothing out of the ordinary. Except that, when she really looked, she saw that the door at the entrance to the novices' house was half open.

She hadn't seen that: someone must have opened it, and told them to go up the forbidden path. So they might not die after all. But that they'd left the door ajar was very strange.

The compulsion she felt to go and pull it to was entirely of her own making, but it was strong nevertheless. She checked there was no one else around, then flitted from tree to tree until she was within striking distance of the porch.

Then she sprinted the rest of the way and stopped only when she was safely hidden within the stone arch. The knocker that Thaler had used was a huge iron hoop fed through the mouth of a dybbuk, so high up that it would have been as much a stretch for him as it was for her.

To say that she was the only Jew ever to see inside the novices' house would be a rare thing. No doubt someone like Rosenbaum would say it was forbidden, but he'd devour every last detail while frowning in disapproval.

Sophia dared to peek, not even touching the wood of the door, at what lay beyond. She couldn't see much, just part of a wide corridor. It was as dark inside as her own house was when she'd blown out the last candle, but the light leaked in through the gap.

It wasn't what she expected. She'd thought it would be much tidier. There were things a book with its binding ripped, a few loose pages lying nearby like lost feathers, a drift of white cloth.

When she realised she couldn't make sense of the scene, she put down the basket that she'd been carrying all that time and pressed her fingertips against the door. It opened easily, swinging back and revealing that what she'd glimpsed was repeated everywhere she looked. Not just a mess, but as if the place had been ransacked.

Things she imagined would have immense value simply lay abandoned. Vandalised books, both paper and boards, had been systematically destroyed and cast into the air to fall where they might land. The piles of cloth she now recognised as the robes of the Order themselves; they, too, had been thrown off.

Other things she failed to recognise, but that looked arcane, were crushed and bent, or broken and shattered.

She took a single step inside, to see down the corridor better. She was standing in her own light now, and the shadows deepened and shifted, but she could see even more of the destruction wrought. The corridor that extended off to her right was filled with debris: some of it seemingly flung from the series of rooms to which it led.

Straight on was a set of stairs, and, judging from the pile of material that had built up on the staircase, things had been thrown from above and then trampled and kicked by the passage of feet heading down.

Chapter end