The Archive

The corridor ran down into the mountain for a long time.

Teo counted the lights in the ceiling as they walked beneath them. Eighty-four. Then the corridor ended in a second door, standing open, and beyond the second door, the mountain was hollow.

He stopped on the threshold and could not go any further.

It was a hall. That was the only word he had for it, though it was far too small a word. The Makers had carved it out of the living rock of Mount Selk... a vast, long chamber, its walls smooth and grey, its ceiling curving high overhead into shadow. Rows of the small yellow lights ran along that ceiling like a road of stars, dim and warm, fading away into the distance. And beneath them, filling the hall from wall to wall, row upon row upon row, stretching away further than the lights could reach...

Shelves.

Tall shelves of grey metal, each one three times the height of a man, standing in long straight ranks like the trees of some vast, orderly forest. And on them, books. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Thick books and thin books, books bound in grey and blue and green and red, books in rows so long and so straight that they seemed to converge on a single point at the far end of the hall. Between the shelves stood tall cabinets of the same grey metal, with drawers... hundreds of drawers, each one labelled with a small plate. And here and there, on low tables, there were glass cases, and in the glass cases, objects that glinted in the dim light. Discs. Plates. Strange shapes of metal and glass.

It was utterly silent. It was perfectly dry. There was not a speck of dust anywhere.

Teo had thought, standing in Valdris Kahl's study under the Crown, that he had seen more books than existed in the whole world. He had been wrong. The Archdeacon's eleven thousand pages, which the Chantry had kept hidden in its vault for four hundred years... they would have fitted on two of these shelves. Perhaps three.

'Valdris has a candle,' Hesk had said. 'This is the sun.'

'...No,' Teo thought dizzily. 'No, Hesk. This is the sky.'

Beside him, Mira had both hands pressed over her mouth. Bram was standing very still, staring up at the nearest shelf, his lips moving silently. It took Teo a moment to realise that the big man was counting the rows.

"How..." Mira's voice came out as a whisper. "How are the lights still burning? After six hundred years?"

It was a good question. Teo did not have an answer. But the answer, as it turned out, was waiting for them on the table by the second door.

It was a plain, sturdy table of grey metal, and on it lay a single book, bound in red. It was not large. It was perhaps as thick as Teo's thumb. Its cover was made of some smooth, stiff material that was neither leather nor cloth, and on the front, in large, clear letters, someone had printed:

START HERE.

And below that, smaller:

A Primer for People Who Have to Begin Again.

Teo picked it up with hands that would not stop shaking, and opened it.

The pages were thick and heavy and slightly waxy to the touch, not at all like the impossibly thin Leaves. The letters were large and plain. And on the very first page, there was a note, written by hand, in neat, slanting ink.

To whoever finds this,

The lights you see run on sunlight. The dark glass panels on the summit drink it during the day, and cells deep in the rock store it. We built them to last a very long time... longer than anything else we ever built. I don't know if they will last until you arrive. If they have, you have been lucky, and so have I.

Everything in this hall is yours. Not ours. Not the people who built it, or the government that paid for it, or the universities that filled it. Yours. We held it in trust, for the day when someone would need it.

Read this book first. It's short. It was written to be understood by anyone who can read, about anything, without any other books to help. After that, the hall is organised by subject, and the index is in the grey cabinet by the door. Take what you need. Take more than you need. Copy it, if you can. Give it away.

Please, whatever you do, give it away.

Ruth Anand, Keeper.

Teo read it twice. Then he turned the page.

The first chapter of the red book was called How to Know Things.

He began to read it aloud, slowly, the way he had read the Leaves to Hesk in the cellar for three years. And by the end of the first page, his voice had begun to shake so badly that he had to stop.

It said that the most important thing anyone could know was not any single fact. Not how to make medicine, or grow food, or build a wall. It was how to know things. How to tell what was true from what was only believed. And the way to do that, the red book said, was not to trust any person, or any book — not even this one — but to ask three questions.

What do you actually observe?

If you were wrong, what would you expect to see instead?

How could you check?

Teo lowered the book.

He did not say anything for a long time. Mira was looking at him. So was Bram.

"...The Three Questions," Mira said softly. "Those are Hesk's Three Questions."

"Yes."

"How did he..."

"The Chantry's vault." Teo's throat was so tight that he could hardly get the words out. "He was an archivist. Before they took his eyes. He must have read a page of this — one page, torn out of a copy, maybe — forty years ago. And he kept it. In his head. All this time. And he taught it to me." He laughed, a strange, choked sound. "He didn't even know where it came from. He thought it was his. He thought... he thought he'd made it up..."

He could not go on.

Mira took the red book gently out of his hands, and set it down on the table, and put her arms around him, and held on. Teo stood there in the vast silent hall with his face pressed against her shoulder, and shook, and did not care who saw.

They spent nine days in the archive.

It was not enough. A lifetime would not have been enough. But they had a long road home, and a mule, and food for perhaps a month if they were careful, and Teo knew, with a cold, sensible part of his mind that had never quite stopped counting, that they could not stay.

So they read. As much as they could, as fast as they could, by the dim yellow light, from waking until they could not keep their eyes open.

The red book was only the beginning. It was a primer... a door into the hall, not the hall itself. It had chapters on water and fire, on bread and soap, on wounds and fevers, on metal and glass and lenses, on measuring and counting. Each chapter ended with a list. For more, see shelves 14 to 22. See cabinet 9, drawers 1 to 40. And when Teo went to shelves 14 to 22, he found a hundred books about the thing he had read about in a single page.

Mira found the medicine. Of course she did. She disappeared into the rows of shelves on the first morning and Teo hardly saw her for three days, except when she came running back to him at odd hours with an armful of books and her eyes blazing, wanting him to read something to her that was written in words too long and strange for her to manage. Fevers. Childbirth. The small lives, the Makers' bacteria and their even smaller cousins, the viruses, which were too small to see even through a bead of glass. Medicines made from mould... from mould, of all things, a grey-green mould that grew on old bread and fruit, which the Makers had used to kill the small lives inside the body itself.

"Penicillin," she said reverently, on the fourth night, turning the word over on her tongue as if it were a prayer. "It's called penicillin. Teo. It's mould. We could grow it. We could grow it in the Mercy House..."

Bram found the farming. He sat for hours in one corner of the hall, turning the pages of a great book full of pictures of fields and ploughs and animals and seeds, slowly, with enormous care, his lips moving as he worked his way through the words. Teo had not known he could read. When he asked, Bram only shrugged and said that his mother had made him learn, so that he could read the seed merchants' bills and know when they were cheating her.

And Teo...

Teo found the glass cases.

The objects in them were discs, mostly. Flat discs of some pale, silvery metal, about the size of his palm, so smooth and bright that they caught the lamplight like the surface of still water. At first, he thought they were mirrors. Then he held one up close to his eye... and saw that its surface was covered in writing.

Not large writing. Writing so tiny that a hundred pages of it would have fitted on the nail of his little finger. Etched into the metal in lines finer than a hair.

The label on the case said: Micro-etched nickel archive. Readable with any lens of 100x magnification or greater. Expected lifespan: 10,000 years.

Teo reached inside his shirt very slowly, and drew out a small brass button with a bead of glass set in its centre.

He held it up against the disc, and put his eye to it.

And there, in the tiny bright circle of the lens, the letters bloomed up out of the metal, sharp and clear and perfect, as if they had been waiting for him.

Chapter One. The Cell.

He sat down on the floor of the archive with the disc in one hand and the button in the other, and stayed there, reading, until the lights in the ceiling began to dim for the night.

On the ninth day, in a small room off the end of the great hall, they found Ruth Anand.

Or what was left of her. It was a little room, a study, with a desk and a chair and a narrow bed, and a small window cut through the rock that looked out over the Ashlands. She was lying on the bed, under a blanket, with her hands folded on her chest. There was not much left of her after six hundred years in the dry mountain air. Bones and a little dark skin, and a few strands of grey hair on the pillow.

On the desk beside her, there was a stack of notebooks. Thirty-one of them. Each one filled with the same neat, slanting handwriting as the note in the red book.

Mira picked up the last one and opened it to the final page. She read it aloud, quietly.

Year 23 alone. The lights still work. My knees don't. I think this is the last entry.

I have tried to write down everything I could remember about why it happened. It's in notebook 27, under 'Why We Fell.' I don't think I got it right. I don't think anyone could. But I've tried to be honest.

To whoever is reading this: I'm sorry. We had so much. We knew so much. And it wasn't enough to save us, because knowing isn't the same as sharing, and it isn't the same as trusting each other.

Do better than we did.

R.

Nobody spoke for a long time.

Then Teo reached past Mira, very gently, and took the twenty-seventh notebook from the stack. He opened it. On the first page, in the same slanting ink, there was a single heading.

WHY WE FELL.