Page 53 of Play of Shadows

The Grand Library

Jereste’s Grand Library, the largest and most prestigious in the entire duchy, was a monument to architecture, scholarship and hypocrisy. Twelve massive columns surrounded the gargantuan storehouse of lore, one for each of the twelve branches of knowledge held within on hundreds of shelves holding thousands of books. Inscribed in glittering gold letters on the arch above the front entrance was a motto that was itself a testament to sanctimony:That nothing true may be lost, and all that is known freely shared.

Shared with all who could afford a pass, to be more precise.

The library warden examining the scholar’s mark on my collar kept one hand on the two-foot-long iron truncheon that served as both badge of office and the means of dispensing with unwanted visitors. His gaze flitted between the gold-edged ebony brooch and its bearer’s clothes. I endured the scrutiny with what dignity I could, all too aware that a quick change of shirt and splash of water on my face had done little to dampen the odours acquired during the actors’ brawl and later worsened by my encounter with the Vixen.

‘How’d you come by this, then?’ the warden asked, pinching the scholar’s mark between thumb and forefinger.

Anticipating the question, I’d prepared what I believed to be the most effective response. ‘None of your fucking business.’

After all, even the truth wouldn’t have satisfactorily explained my possession of the scholar’s mark. ‘Someone gave it to me’ would have invited the question ofwho, and the lack of a credible reply would have convinced the warden that the brooch had been stolen and the miscreant in possession of it a liar, a thief and possibly a murderer. He would summon his fellow guards and soon thereafter I’d be suffering a repeat of last night’s unpleasantness, this time without any twelve-year-old brick-hurling street urchins to come to my rescue.

The warden locked eyes with me, twitching his truncheon as if doing so would shake the interloper before him into revealing the origin of this gold scholar’s mark, but I didn’t blink. I’d stood up to the Vixen last night– admittedly, it was under Corbier’s influence, but I still wasn’t about to go scurrying away because a bored library warden didn’t like the look of me.

Some claimed there were more wardens in the Grand Library of Jereste than there were guards employed by the Ducal Palace, and while the duke no doubt hoped this was not the case, no one could doubt that these armed guardians of knowledge took their role as protectors seriously and prided themselves on their merciless enforcement. I’d been told they carried truncheons instead of bladed weapons to reduce the chance of harming a book or scroll on those occasions when they found it necessary to bludgeon a patron into unconsciousness.

‘There’s a placard inside the front doors, and at the top of the stairs for each floor,’ this one said, finally removing his thumb and forefinger from my collar. ‘You follow those rules when handling the books and you won’t have any problems. Break one of themand we’ll break something of yours.’

‘Hardly my first time here, friend,’ I lied glibly, striding past the warden.

‘We’ll be keeping an eye on you,’ he called out.

Guess it’s not only actors who feel the need to get the last line.

Once through the arch and into the sprawling, centuries-old building, I paused to catch my breath, my senses overwhelmed at the scale of the library, surely as magnificent as any palace. Each circular floor had rows of long, curved shelves, forming colonnades around a central avenue where supervising librarians sat at gleaming wooden desks, watching the patrons perusing books or filling in the sheaves of forms necessary for access to the rarer tomes kept at the top of the building. What kind of life must it be, surrounded daily by so much knowledge? Science, art, mathematics, philosophy. . . A person could spend their life here reading novels filled with tales sacred and profane, imagining other possibilities for their future.

My fingers reached up once again to feel the scholar’s brooch, only to realise I’d instead gone to the Veristor’s mark pinned to the other side of my collar. Had that been mere instinct, or was Corbier’s influence even now guiding my hand?

I made my way to the historical section on the second floor and searched for everything covering the period a hundred years ago when the conflicts between Pierzi and Corbier had dominated the duchy’s affairs. I felt an unexpected surge of pride when I found only a few books which weren’t already in the Operato Belleza’s own library. It was a matter of honour that the historias presented by the Knights of the Curtain were the most authentic of any company in the city.

Well, until I’d got involved, at any rate.

I carried three hefty leather-bound volumes to one of the reading desks, their back-bending weight reminding me how exhausted I was. The prospect of spending the entire day poring over them, before rushing back to the theatre for another dreadful performance – sure to end in further disaster – left me nauseous.

Tits up, brother, I imagined Beretto saying in that infuriatingly optimistic tone of his.I’ll bet one of these books has a terrific last line you can deliver right before they hang you.

Hours later, barely able to focus, my single momentous discovery was that the number of spelling mistakes made by scribes reproducing a text increased the closer they got to the end.

So far the only book that had provided any real insight into the Raven’s life was a medical text, probably misfiled because of its title:Observations Of Ocular Maladies, Being An Account Of Certain Peculiar Conditions Of The Eyes Such As Those Of Prelate Urdius, Archduke Corbier, And Other Notables. Corbier’s eyes had been blue until shortly before his seventh birthday when, overnight, the irises turned dark red. The physician who wrote the book believed this was due to an illness that caused the blood vessels in the eye to swell and rise to the surface; he suggested this could have been ameliorated with the use of certain illicit herbal remedies. Of course, his hypothesis directly contradicted the far more popular theory that Corbier was a demon-spawn who’d chosen to at last reveal his vile nature.

The physician’s less supernatural speculations were mildly interesting, but brought me no closer to understanding Corbier the man. I turned to the next book on the pile, but found my attention drawn not to the words, but to the odd little drawings squirming along the margins of the pages like trails of insects: weaponry, fierce beasts, and, in some of the more obscure tracts, what looked like poorly disguised decorative genitalia. This being Pertine, of course, illustrations of flowers and vines were everywhere. Mentions of marriages got roses, and the blue pertine showed up wherever a coronation was discussed. None of it was proving to be particularly illuminating.

But when I came across the adornments in the third book,The Garden of Majesty, a slender volume by one Sigurdis Macha, my curiosity was piqued. The handwritten journal, bound in cracked, dark green leather, purported to recount the ‘Glorious Deedes of the Noble Lineages of Pertine’, but it read more like thinly veiled parody.

‘. . . of such fertile seed did Margrave Lurius the Mighty bloom that one almost wonders whether the good God War was its source, rather than his father, who was said to be eighty at his son’s birth and was known to have suffered an unfortunate amputation of his noble staff several years earlier. Truly is the potency of the ruling classes herein proved,’ I read aloud, ignoring the disapproving stares around me.

A later passage was even less circumspect:How playful are the noble souls of this city, how merry. How often we find those in power and those who seek it almost like children grasping at each other’s toys.

Such innuendo was typical of satirical biographies; there were any number of similarly salacious plays. What surprised me were the passages inferring ducal corruption. The marginalia suggested grey lilies entwined around golden crowns, but the longer I stared at them, the more I was convinced they were actually orchids.

Iron orchids, perhaps?

The flaw in my clever theory was that the date inside the front cover ofThe Garden of Majestywas nearly a century ago and the Iron Orchids first appeared in Jereste only a few years back. And who was this Sigurdis Macha anyway? The name was surely a pseudonym; what loving parents would call their newborn ‘Cutter of Weeds’ in archaic Tristian?

My stomach rumbling, I pushed the book aside.

Twilight was only an hour away and I would soon need to race back to the Belleza to get into my costume and memorisewhatever mangled lines Shoville had added to the script. And there was that ‘rehearsal’ Roslyn had in mind for the two of us. . .

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