Librar

Origin

The splice is Irugaine, owl, feline and elephant, and the code was locked. Where the Eaven were made to see for the General, the Librar were made to know for the Oracle, and their method under Alveria was torture. "During the great Alverian war, these titans of the sky held no bound to their ambitious knowledge seeking ends. Through severe torture they would require whatever information the Alverian's required." The two archives were set against each other from the first and are at war still.

When the empire fell they kept what they had. "Myth goes they have stolen many great pieces of technology that would have assisted humanity after the great collapse of Alveria," and the myth is true. One Librar nest-library came down in Silverfell and survives there "as an ancient ruins/religious site"; the escaped-slave culture that grew around the wreck became a house that later joined the Pendragon kingdom. That house is not Crowden, the Pendragons' stewards, and the Librar had no hand in the raising of it; whatever Crowden keeps, it did not come from these.

The citadels came later. The canopy hives grew too few and too known, and one by one the Librar came down out of the trees and had walls built. They did not build them. They bought the work, or extracted it, from those who build for hire, and the largest of the citadels are Fathari work, laid stone on stone over a lifetime by masons who were paid in knowledge and in gold and who did not ask what the rooms were for. Around each citadel the Librar set the devices they had taken from the ruins of Alveria: doors that unweave, walls that bleed red light at a footfall, bronze things in the grass that were built to keep slaves in and now keep everyone out.

Body

Ten feet tall and built like a folded umbrella. The wingspan hangs down the body "like a cloak," long and flowing and faintly luminous, and at rest a Librar reads as a robed figure until the robe moves on its own. The head is owl over elephant. "On either side of their curved beaks are two tusks, with one growing out of their top beak." The skin beneath the feathers is tough. Under the wings hang "two feeble feline arms," small, soft-furred and near useless for labour, which is the point: they were built to hold documents, not tools. Elders cannot stand well on their thin old legs and carry "wooden stick canes" when not in flight. A grown Librar weighs between four and five hundred pounds, most of it feather and wing; the body inside the cloak is narrow.

Everything peculiar about the people comes out of one structural fact, which is that the makers put an elephant's head on a bird. The skull is the only heavy bone in the animal. The braincase is walled, the jaw is deep, and the three tusks are solid ivory rooted in sockets that run back past the eye, and the whole assembly weighs more than the ribcage, the pelvis and both legs together. Everything below the neck is pneumatic: strut-bone, air sac, quill. A Librar is a head with a kite attached to it.

The neck accordingly is not a neck. It is a short fused column of six vertebrae locked into the shoulders, and it does not bend upward at all. A Librar looks up by leaning its entire body back on its heels and it looks down by stooping, and neither is quick. The animal cannot climb a stair with any confidence, because it cannot see its own feet and the head wants to go over the front. This is why a citadel is entered from the roof and why the eye of the dome is the true door: a Librar comes down through it on a slow spiral into the archive room and never has to negotiate a step. The ground door is for tradesmen, and the tradesmen are watched by things that were made to watch slaves.

The tusks are not weapons and no Librar has ever used one as such. They are props. A reading Librar kneels, sets its two lower tusks into a pair of worn hollows in a stone block, and rests the whole weight of the skull there, and in that position it can hold a page or a listener for eleven hours without moving. Every archive room in the world has these blocks, polished to a shine by ivory, the hollows a finger deep in the oldest houses and cut fresh in the newest. When a Librar dies the tusks come out and go into the wall of the innermost room, which means that the wall the young are taught in front of is a wall of the things that held their elders' heads up. They do not find this morbid. They find it structural.

The eyes are owl eyes and they are tubes, not spheres, wedged into the socket and immobile, so the Librar cannot glance; it must turn the whole heavy head, slowly, and every conversation with one has that deliberate swing in it that outsiders read as gravity and is in fact a hinge. The retina is built for starlight and ruined by day. A Librar in full sun is half blind, in pain, and knows it, which is the entire reason the species does its business at night and the entire reason its buildings are windowless above the second course.

Hearing is the instrument of the trade. The facial disc gathers, the ear openings sit at different heights on the skull so that sound arrives twice with a difference in it, and a Librar standing in a room can place a mouse under the floor to within a hand's breadth. Across a table it hears the guest's heart. It hears the heart quicken before the guest knows it has, it hears the breath catch behind a civil answer, and it hears the gut work. No Librar has ever needed a rack to know that it is being lied to. The old methods were for what came after the knowing. The gentleness the species is famous for is entirely genuine and entirely unnecessary, and that is the worst thing about it.

Under the hooting chorus that carries a mile there is a second voice nobody else hears, a rumble pitched below the floor of Nu'uman hearing, thrown from the chest and carried through cold night air for twenty miles and more. Citadels talk to each other this way. A house knows an Asker is coming home a day before it lands, and a house that has been attacked has told its neighbours before the attackers are through the grass. The Eaven, whose ears are a wolf's and are excellent, cannot hear it at all, and this is the one advantage the Librar have ever held in that war and the one thing about themselves they never sell.

The feline arms are the makers' cruellest economy. They are strong enough to lift a folio, turn a page, hold a pen, unstopper a bottle and take a wrist; they cannot lift a stone, swing an adze, drive a peg or hold a rope. A people built like this cannot construct anything and never has. Every wall the Librar own was raised by somebody else, every device in their grass was made by somebody else, and every page in their libraries that is not their own was taken from somebody else. The arms are the reason the species is a parasite of craft, and they were designed that way, and the Oracle presumably thought it funny.

They live about two thousand years. Flight, and "infinite knowledge retention," and the wing-beat that is their only weapon: "hurricane force beating with their wings, causing an upheaval in the air, which can send most flying far back away from them." It is a defence and not an attack. It buys the four seconds a Librar needs to get its head off the ground.

Life

There are young, and they are taught: "this species has passed down knowledge and the teachings of Alveria to their youth." The owl rules the breeding line. A Librar pair lays a single egg perhaps once in a century, in the innermost room of the citadel, and broods it in turns for a year and a day in darkness, because the eye of a Librar chick that first opens on light will never see well in it afterward. A lamp brought into a brooding room is the gravest accident that can happen in a house, and the houses that have had one keep the date.

The elephant rules the raising. The hatchling stays with its mother for a hundred years and does not fly in that time, for the plain reason that the skull comes in before the wing and a young Librar is head-heavy past all safety until its eighth decade. Those hundred years are called the Dark, and they are spent on the floor of the archive room in front of the tusk wall. It is taught by recitation, first the archive of its own house and then the archives of the houses the house has stolen from, and it is not counted a Librar and not given its name until it can answer any question its elders put to it from memory alone. In its last decade of teaching it is given the old methods: how a question is put to a subject who will not answer, how a heart sounds when it is about to break, and how long a subject lasts. The Librar do not hide this from their young. Knowledge that is not complete is worthless, and the method is part of the knowledge.

The first flight closes the Dark and is done at night from the eye of the dome with the whole house rumbling below. After it the young one is an Asker's apprentice for two centuries, then an Asker, and the middle twelve hundred years of a Librar's life are spent going out into the world and coming back with things.

Ageing takes the legs first and the wings last, which is the reverse of every other flying people and is the skull's doing: two thousand years of carrying that head crushes the leg joints from the ankle up. A Librar of fifteen hundred years walks on a cane and flies like a hatchling. Death comes in sleep, in the archive room, and the body is not burned or buried. It is kept. The skull and the tusks are set in the wall of the innermost room among those of every Librar the house has lost, and the young are taught facing them.

They eat little and eat meat, small game taken silently at night on the wing, and the elephant in them gives them a taste for fruit and bark they do not admit to. They drink, and they keep a cellar; a citadel's wine is old and a guest is always offered it, and the guest should understand that the offer is the beginning of the interview. The wine is racked over shed cloak-feathers, which give it the faint shine in the glass that travellers remark on, and which take the last four or five hours out of a drinker's evening as cleanly as a knife. This is why the folk who take their sick to a citadel come home healed, grateful, and unable to account for a night.

Frailty

The legs go and the house knows how long it has. A Librar past twelve hundred is on a cane, past sixteen hundred cannot rise unassisted, and spends its last centuries kneeling at the reading block, which is where it dies. The joints ulcerate under the fused ankle and the ulcers do not close in a bird that cannot lie down, and the smell of an old Librar's legs is one of the few honest signals a visitor gets in a citadel.

The head kills the young as well as the old. A chick that grows the skull faster than the frame cannot hold itself upright, and in the oldest houses, which are the most inbred, this comes round every few clutches. Such a hatchling never flies and never walks, and is carried to the reading block and propped there, and is taught. They live a long time and they are frequently the finest memories a house has ever produced, because nothing has ever interrupted them. A house with one of these in the corner of its archive room does not mention it and will not sell what it holds at any price.

The feathers are the other quiet ruin. The luminous barbs are fine and hollow and they rot in damp, and a citadel is a stone drum in wet country. Feather-rot takes the cloak in patches, the light goes out of it, and a Librar that has lost its cloak is not permitted to stand at a bargain, since the whole of the species' authority is the robe that moves on its own. Houses burn coal and sweet wood day and night against the damp, which is why a citadel smells of smoke a mile downwind and why the Askers can always find their way home in fog.

And there is the arithmetic. One egg, once in a century, and a hundred years before the chick can leave the floor. A house is four or five persons. A bad night, a fire, a rival's Librathorn in the lower rooms, and two thousand years of gathering ends with nobody left alive who can say what was in it. This has happened more often than the houses admit, and it is the reason the Librvor exist and the reason they hold the archives of houses that no longer do.

Country

The Surface Realm, in country nobody else wants. The old homes are the Libest, "the database hives of the Librar, where the ancient technologies and knowledge of the ancient and modern world are stored in secret. They are woven into the canopy of complex trees and are only accessed at night, thus further protecting the location of their domains." The fallen nest-library at Silverfell is the one site the world can point to.

The present homes are citadels built for them in the wilderness and guarded by stolen devices. A citadel is round, windowless above the second course, and entered from the top; a Librar lands on the roof and lets itself down through the eye of the dome, and the ground door is for tradesmen. Inside, the floors are ramped and not stepped, the ceilings are low and very wide, and the doorways are broader than they are tall, all of it cut to the turning circle of a head that cannot look up. A few of the oldest Libest are still occupied by houses that never came down, high in the crowns of the complex trees, reached only in the dark.

A citadel changes a district over a century, and the change is hard to see and easy to feel. The small game goes first, not to extinction but to silence: within a day's flight of a house, the hares are nocturnal where they were not, the ground birds nest under cover, and the whole countryside has learned that the sky at night is dangerous. The folk who stay do well, because the Librar physick them and because the wilderness is safer with a house in it than without, since nothing large will settle near the devices. What the district loses is its own account of itself. Three generations in, nobody can tell you where the old boundary ran or what the standing stone was for, and the answers are all in a round building in the trees, filed under a bargain that was struck with somebody's grandmother over a glass of shining wine.

Society

A hoarding culture with excellent manners. "Kind and caring, manipulative in the hunt for knowledge." "They are greedy and hoard rather than share." Both are true at once; a Librar will nurse you, feed you and never stop asking questions. They do their business at night.

Each citadel is a house, and a house is ruled by its Eldest, who holds the archive entire. Beneath the Eldest are the Askers, who go out into the world and come back with what they went for; beneath the Askers the Keepers, who hold and order what is brought; and at the foot of the house the Libra'an, who write. Writing is done for trade only. A Librar's own knowledge is never set down, because a page can be stolen and a mind cannot, or so they held until the Tusiva were made, and the houses have been uneasy on the point ever since.

They dress in their own wings and nothing else, save that an Eldest wears a chain of Alverian bronze across the breast and a Librathorn wears its harness. Their music is a low hooting chorus at moonrise that carries for a mile, with the rumble running under it that the audience cannot hear, so that outsiders invited to listen report a strange pressure in the chest and put it down to the wine. Their custom with guests is famous: a traveller taken in at a citadel is fed, warmed, physicked and questioned, gently, for as long as it takes, and is let go with a gift and with no memory of what was asked.

Their oath is sworn on the name of the Oracle and is kept; a Librar that breaks a bargain of knowledge is stripped of its name and put out of the house, and a nameless Librar is a thing the others hunt. Their taboo is to give freely. Knowledge is bought or taken. It is never given, and the one courtesy a Librar cannot perform is to answer a question because it was asked politely.

Faith

They serve the Great Alverian Oracle and answer to no one else, and like the Eaven they wait for a master who is not coming. They hold it as a standing order rather than a creed. The Oracle is named at the beginning of every teaching and the end of every bargain, and the young are told he lives and the old are careful not to say otherwise, and no Librar prays.

What they have instead is the Question. The oldest houses teach that there is one question the Oracle set them at the making, that every fact they have gathered since is a piece of the answer, and that the Oracle alone knows what the question was. Some Eldest have spent their lives trying to reconstruct it from the shape of what he wanted. None has.

The truth of it is that the Oracle was an Alverian lord, that he is dead or in the dark with the rest, and that when a Librar dies in its archive room its soul goes to the auction of the star gods with every other soul in the world. The Librar, who know so much, know nothing of this, and there is no line in any archive that hints at it.

Tongue

They speak Common and many tongues besides, and the tongues were written into their blood at the making, as they were into the serpents'. A Librar hears a language once and has it. They speak High Alverian among themselves. A Librar's name is given at the end of its teaching and is the first secret it stole alone, rendered into High Alverian and compressed to two syllables; as it ages it adds to the name in the Alverian manner, and an Eldest's full name takes a quarter of an hour to say and is itself an inventory.

In the short form by which the peoples of the world know them: Vessarel, Othrim, Kaudra, Sethenor, Ilvaresh, Tamoquel, Rhoswen-of-the-Ninth-Door, Aumbrel.

Regard

"A myth." "Overbearing and an annoyance." The third verdict is common enough to be the real one and cannot be set down: it calls them bloated and self important, and it accuses them of putting their noses where those noses are not wanted and of watching other people in a way that is felt as indecent. And the grudge that outlasts all the rest: the technology they stole "would have assisted humanity after the great collapse of Alveria." Wilderness folk who live within a day of a citadel call it the Owl House and take their sick there, because the Librar heal well and ask only questions, and the folk have long since stopped noticing that they cannot remember the answers they gave.

The Eaven are their enemies and the war between the two archives has no end in it, since neither can be destroyed and neither will share. The Papillian love them: "the Papillians love them as they share with them knowledge and value the knowledge they have to offer; if a Papillian nest is near a Librar, you must tread lightly." The Fathari are their builders, and a Fathari mason who has raised a citadel is watched by the house for the rest of its long life, in case it should ever be asked about the plan of the rooms.

Harvest

"Never before has one been captured or killed," which is a claim made by a people who control their own archive. The tusks of a dead Librar are set in the wall of its own house and no outsider has held one. The cloak-feathers hold a faint light for years after they are shed and are sometimes found beneath old Libest trees, and sold as lamp-feathers by people who do not know what tree they were standing under. A house that learns of the sale sends an Asker, and the Asker does not come for the feathers.

Remembered

Vessarel. Eldest of the Owl House in the eastern wilds, said to have been hatched under Alveria and to remember the Oracle's face. Vessarel does not confirm this and does not deny it, and the ambiguity is worth more to the house than the answer.

The Great Alverian Oracle. A title with nothing behind it now, spoken at the beginning of every teaching in every citadel standing.

Kin each has a page of its own

The lock stands, and the three forms below are castes within the one genome, thrown by the same eggs and recognised in the first year by the weight of the leg and the set of the skull. A house does not choose what it gets. It raises what hatches and gives it the work its body can do.