It is a strange thing, but as I worked to betray my friends, all I felt was love for them. It was as if they had suddenly become precious to me. I was emerging from a haze of drunkenness, of late nights, of balls and banquets, that I had claimed had nothing to do with the humdrum life of Haunts and Scribbles. I had fled from the dusty scholars into the arms of songsters, whose presence was pure pleasure. But there is more to love than pleasure. There is a steadiness to it, a decency, a sense that the ones you love think about you when you’re not there. That they might do things for you even when it doesn’t benefit them much. When you act in a way that is disgusting, they have the good grace to be disgusted. It is true that they make pesky claims to know the real you, but I was learning that there might be some value in listening to those claims, even when one is trying to flee from the uncomfortable idea that there might be such a thing as the real you. Your true friends do you the favor of preserving those parts of yourself that you have no use for in the present, but might want to get to know again later.

  I wanted to be close to Lianahndra, and not just because I was tasked with spying on her. Suddenly I found that I cared for her, that I had probably always cared for her, although I pretended not to because she wasn’t shy about criticizing me. I walked by her door four or five times that afternoon before I realized that the chambers across the landing from her own were unoccupied. They were the habitation of a scholar named Yundrid who was, fortunately, off in far Basamortuko, studying the desert people. I was not supposed to be in his rooms, of course, and my hiding place would have been more discreet if I hadn’t had to keep the door cracked to listen for Lian. But if anyone asked I would say that an annoying fly had invaded my own chambers, and that I had fled in search of somewhere private to read. They wouldn’t believe me, since most people wouldn’t countenance the idea that I could read at all, but they would accept my lie because of my known eccentricity. At least I hoped they would. If that failed, I could simply pretend to be drunk, and in the wrong chambers by accident.

  Yundrid’s chambers were quite cold, of course, as I could not light a fire lest I give away my position. I shivered and passed the time trying to read the two volumes that Moesebai had directed me to. I am not an ordinary scholar, it is true, and many people would claim that I am not a scholar at all. I am not inclined to read dull treatises in search of some fine point. But as I have already said, I delight in the moment of discovery, the in-breaking of the ridiculous into the ordinary world. My usual scholarly habit is to pick a book at random and flip through it until I find something that makes me smile. I could not behave this way towards Vahrakuhl Gudoe’s Annals or the Tome of Chitrahv Chadhi. Both books were like a boring drunkard whom you meet in a wineshop, who might have an interesting tale to tell, but who dresses it up with extraneous details and goes off on wild digressions, exhausting your patience eventually, even if they insist on buying the drinks.

  I shivered intermittently as I read. I had taken a brick from Lianahndra’s horde, and it provided an ideal paperweight, holding down the pages of Chadhi’s tome as I strove to decipher the handwriting. This Chitrahv Chadhi character was obsessed with a lost book that was called the Claibrae Codex, although he annoyingly assumed that his reader knew what this codex was all about. Squinting and struggling, I eventually discerned that it had been written by a cult leader, a whimsical fellow who believed that the strange markings you sometimes see on the walls of caves were left by a giant insect. That they were written in insect language. This revelation meant nothing to me. I was supposed to be learning about the spirit stones. I skipped ahead, turning the pages slowly as I had to struggle to scan through the misshaped words. It seems that this Claibrae and his followers believed that the markings referred to the spirit stones. That they gave instructions for the stone’s use. Not to found a shrine, mind you, but to open a door back to the Previous World.

  I am not a great believer in the Previous World. I can, however, understand the attraction. Your life is sad and you find yourself wishing for something else. So you conjure a vision of a place where everything is perfect. Well and good. You don’t want it to be a future place, because that would imply that you have to do some work to get there, striving to make the world perfect and all that. But why make it a past place? An origin story? If you do that, then you have to ask why we don’t live in that world anymore. Were we banished from it? Rejected by it? How does that thought make life any easier? No, if I engage in wistful fantasies of a perfect world, it is a world that exists, somehow, alongside our own. If a door opened into it, I’m not certain that I would step through it. Maybe it’s enough just to think that another world exists.

  If the stones were meant to open these doors, and if no one, including this Claibrae, had ever figured out how they worked, then it seemed to imply that the shrines were just antechambers, and that the ghosts were all clustered around the shrines’ spirit stones, waiting for the day when the door would open. A bleak picture of the afterlife, I thought, and then wondered what image of the afterlife I had previously entertained. None, really. I hadn’t, until that moment, thought much about death, even after my parents died. It was a subject that I actively avoided. But it made me sad, to think of Lewibindi sitting for eternity in a waiting room, as I had been made to sit from time to time while waiting for the Archivist to summon me into her chambers and chastise me for one form of misbehavior or another. I wanted better for my friend.

  There was a rustle of cloth on the landing and I went still, wondering if my hideaway had been discovered. But whoever it was knocked on Lianahndra’s door. I crept to the door of Old Yundrid’s chambers and peered through the crack. The Archivist herself was standing on the landing, as if my thinking about her had summoned her.

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  Lian opened her door and peered out. The Archivist said, “We must speak,” and Lianahndra let her in. It was all very furtive, as the Archivist glanced up and down the stairs before she entered.

  I crept across the landing. Scholars, fortunately, are not very good at maintaining buildings and don’t often bother about little things like sinking foundations. No doubt the doors in Haunts and Scribbles had all been plumb when they were hung, oh those many eons ago, but the floor had tilted away from them, leaving cracks beneath them when they closed. I sank into a squat with my back against the wall. The door of Yundrid’s chambers stood open, and I told myself that if anyone came up or down the stairs, I could vault across the landing before they saw me. I was fortunate that the entire building had fallen into a deep silence. No one wanted to make too much noise, as that would imply that they weren’t properly grieving for Lewibindi.

  “Are you despairing?” the Archivist asked Lianahndra. Her words were soft and kindly, the tone of voice that I had always wanted to hear when the Archivist spoke to me, but never had.

  “I am wondering,” Lian said, “what purpose any of it serves. We have only managed to delay them. We haven’t stopped them.”

  “No. But we will.”

  “How are you certain?”

  “Because we must.”

  A pause. A footstep moving across the room. I tensed, but the step didn’t come to the door. “He doubted, you know. I could see that he doubted. That in the end he was doing it for me. Not for the cause.”

  “Yes,” the Archivist said. “That is how causes work. Something makes you angry. You read about what happened in the past. You think about the people who suffered, the people who were killed, the knowledge that was lost. All so that some king or emperor could feel a little more powerful. And why did they want to feel powerful at all? Out of the illusion that power keeps us safe? But you can see it all happening again. That makes you afraid. Who is going to suffer now? What will be lost? So you decide to act. But all of the actions are imperfect. Many fail. Others succeed, but the cost it greater than you expected. You might want to stop acting, but by then you love the people who have been helping you. They need your help. You can’t betray them.”

  Silence for awhile. Too much silence. It made me paranoid. Did the Archivist know that I was outside the door? Were her little speech directed at me?

  When Lian spoke again, her words were wet with tears. “I wanted to find a scroll. That’s all. Something written by Ifrit of Basokume. But the librarian of the third floor told me that it didn’t exist. It was destroyed during the second Raensapali conquest. I wanted to know who to blame, so I read about the conquest. They murdered the mayor, you know. They made him swallow an agbalokri egg, and it took him seventeen days to die. The agbalokri hatched inside him and devoured his insides.”

  “The Raensapali were tyrants. They were vicious.”

  “Yes. And I found a portrait of the mayor at that time. He posed with his family. Five little children. They were all killed, too. He was made to watch as they were tortured and beheaded. They tortured children, Archivist.”

  “I know.”

  “But the really frightening thing, the thing that I’m ashamed of, is that I thought it was all in the past. I thought that I was safe, that Libreigia was safe. We were protected. Until the Azerdondea came.”

  “That is always the mistake. To think that horrors can only exist in the past.”

  “Lew and I would argue about it. He would say that they weren’t really that horrible. The Azerdondea. They began to charm him. And I had to remind him that the Raensapali weren’t horrible at first, either. I read the Raeyadahta when I was a girl. It was one of my favorites. I thought that Raeyahkoni was a hero, and I wept when Ohdoparva died. But they weren’t heroes. They were cruel when they felt that they had to be, and they justified it by saying that their cruelty protected people. But then the emperors cared less and less about people, and only cruelty remained. It will happen here. It happens everywhere, when there are kings.”

  “You saved him.”

  “Saved him?”

  “You didn’t save his life, but you saved him from believing a falsehood. You saved him from betraying everything that he knew, just because the Prince of Churls throws pleasant parties.”

  “But he’s dead!”

  “Yes, but he died as himself. True to his beliefs. Because of you. Lianahndra. You are wasting your anger. You are directing it at yourself, when it should be directed at our enemies. You did not kill Lewibindi. The Azerdondea killed him. It is how they prove their tyranny. By stalking and killing those who disagree with them. They want us afraid. They want to turn us against each other. We must not let them to do.”

  The door to Yundrid’s chambers loomed larger and larger on the other side of the landing. I wanted to leap across to it close myself in. To brick myself up in that cold room and never emerge from it. Or to be drunk. For years and years. To never be anything but drunk.

  Lianahdra was speaking again. “Are we in danger? If they bring a Sasturi, if the Sasturi lets his ghost ride them, then they’ll know everything.”

  “Yes,” the Archivist said. “But we must hope that his ghost fled form his body. We must hope that when the sun sets, it will come here. It will come home.”