Servants of the Nexus (Wayfarer Chronicles #1)

Chapter 10

In all her long years as a Wayfarer, Saenu had stepped foot inside their archives only a handful of times. They inhabited a little-trod corner of the Under Realm, staffed by strange beings that appeared to be neither spirit nor Kin. In truth, Saenu found their cowled, faceless forms rather eerie and preferred to avoid their presence when she could. Besides, she had little interest in the history of the Wayfarers, and most of the documents that might have interested her were in tongues either too ancient or too arcane to be remembered. She might have learnt them, she supposed, in the many centuries she’d had available, but protecting the living worlds beyond the Under Realm had always seemed more important.
Now, though, she had reason to enter their halls. Very good reason indeed.
Like much in the Under Realm that had not been directly constructed by Wayfarer hands, the archives took a natural form. Great trees, larger than any that could exist in an outside world, formed the central repository, their branches arched and woven together overhead to form a roof. Inside, along an avenue of trunks like pillars, every spare inch was crammed with papers, books and scrolls, written on parchment and vellum and stranger skins. Shelves had been carved into the living trees, erected between their boles, and hammered together in haphazard constructions in the centre of the hall. Every surface was used, every nook and cranny, and through it all glided the librarians.
Saenu stood uncomfortably in the entrance vestibule, waiting for their arrival, but none came. It took her several minutes to realise that it wasn’t the librarians at fault - it was her.
So off came her boots, and her sword belt, and her long coat, anything that could cause damage to the precious contents of the archives. She stowed her belongings in a locker, of sorts - the branches fringing the alcove stirred at her touch, curling protectively around her possessions, to keep them safe for her return. And then, because she was ready, a librarian emerged.
Whether the creatures had ever been human, Saenu couldn’t say. They hid beneath thick brown robes, hoods pulled low to reveal only shadow beneath; even their feet, if they had them, were invisible, and the librarians glided across floor and scattered papers alike as though they had no need to touch the floor.
Saenu, of course, had to pick her way more carefully. There was hardly a bare inch of floor in the place, every lane between the shelves stacked high with books and carpeted in papers. If there was method to their arrangement, she couldn’t see it, so Saenu tiptoed across them, never knowing if she was stepping on ancient histories or shopping lists. The librarians, she sensed, didn’t see the world as she did - to them, there was logic in adorning their lair so. Still, when Saenu caught an errant volume with her toe, knocking it into another stack, the librarian leading her paused to look back with what she assumed was admonition.
She swallowed against the dry, dusty air. “My apologies.”
The librarian gave no nod or other sign, merely continued on.
They came to the central hub of the archives, an octagonal dais set all about with chairs. Here, the librarian paused, and Saenu cleared her throat again. “I seek any papers you might have on the history of an individual. One of the Kin - Gaesten.”
There was a pause, in which the librarian went still and Saenu dropped hurriedly into one of the ring of chairs. Better to be seated - she knew what was coming.
There was a great whoosh of air that somehow didn’t disturb the surrounding archive, then the bottom dropped out of Saenu’s stomach. The dais seemed now to be floating in eternal black, but her body told her they were moving - up, left, up again. Her hair lifted like Medusa’s snakes, and then with a jolt that made Saenu’s gut heave, they were still again.
Somewhere along the way, the dais had shrunk, now only large enough to hold Saenu, her seat and the librarian. The latter faced her with what she could only assume was a directive to disembark. She did so.
In a blink, the dais was gone again and Saenu sighed. She knew from experience that, whilst being led into the archives was easy enough, tracking down a librarian to take you out again could take hours.
She’d been deposited in the doorway of a smaller room, this one only twelve feet or so in height and twice that in length. The walls were still living, but here the trunks were verdant, sprouting smaller branches, moss and ferns. The foliage closed across the books like protective doors and rustled with Saenu’s passing. In the centre of the room she paused and closed her eyes. Experience had taught her, too, that whilst the librarians might not take you directly to what you sought, they rarely left you without direction.
And there it was, tugging at the edge of her consciousness, like a memory of a map she couldn’t remember seeing. It led her to a shadowed corner, where the floor hollowed into a moss-edged pool, water dripping down the shelves as down a tiered cliff. The books, of course, were well away from the water: the librarians might be odd and their domain more so, but they were never negligent. Conditions in the Under Realm meant their documents might last ten thousand years or more.
It was at the very edge of the pool, on a bottom shelf, that Saenu found what she was looking for. A single volume, bound in red leather, with a name on the spine in gilt: Gaesten. As she picked it up, Saenu shivered. She’d expected fragmented papers, texts from the period of his mortal life, but this... Did it mean there was a book on all of them, even one on her? If there was, she realised, she didn’t want to know.
She began to flick through the book. It wasn’t, after all, a single narrative or history. Instead, texts of all kinds appeared to have been reproduced, from newspaper clippings to official court papers. They weren’t ordered, being instead scattered through the book as though simply dropped into place. Except, in the very centre were a handful of pages that had a very different nature.
Saenu shivered at the sight of them. Even the paper was different, thin as a breath and scribbled on in a dozen different hands. The text was in a language that Saenu had always thought of as that of the Kin - she’d never been taught it, but had discovered over the years that she could read it without being able to write it. The latter, she believed, was reserved for whoever, or whatever, led the Wayfarers.
If any such beings existed. Young Wayfarers were always recruited by their older peers and, after a period of training, became largely autonomous; it was only the scale of their operation, and that someone had to have been the first, that made Saenu suspect someone was in charge. Someone who could write in this script, and thus leave tangled messages about the history of the Kin across as many worlds as there were stars in the sky.
She read the delicate pages with a sinking feeling. The first was a rather dry description of the world from which Gaesten had originally come, detailing its ‘practices of subsistence agriculture’, ‘market economy’ and, most interestingly, its ‘high levels of magical aptitude’. No wonder Gaesten had, as a Wayfarer, become such an accomplished sorceror.
The next pages looked almost to be the work of someone thinking, their notes haphazard and spidery. There was a list spanning several sheets, every entry the name of a deadly disease. They ranged from ancient plagues that had been eradicated in inner Nexus worlds, to genetically modified bioweapons that - thankfully - remained confined to the ‘advanced’ realms that had forged them.
And there, at the end of the list, a single name had been repeated and circled: indigo fever. Saenu had encountered the disease once or twice, finding towns, countries, even whole worlds that had been decimated by its more virulent strains. Even in the inner Nexus, there was no known cure; containment was the only option.
The next page held a sketched image of a man with two small children beside him. All were plump and smiling, evidently a happy family, and it took Saenu a moment to realise that she was looking at a drawing of Gaesten. This had to have been him in his mortal form - years as a Wayfarer had done what it did to all of them, stretching him thin, drawing pale skin tight over paler bone, wearing him down until he was but a wan shade of his former self. Kin.
Even before Saenu turned to the next page, she knew what she would find. How else could a happy, mortal Gaesten relate to that vicious list of diseases? How else but this?
This page was different again, a thicker, poor quality parchment stitched into the book. The entry, in browning ink, was almost like a diary, though incoherent and without a date. It looked to have been written in a hurry and without care, though that made it no less potent.
Dead, all of them. Mara, the children. All of them. I am the last.
‘They’ say it is coincidence, that I must be what They call ‘immune’, but I see the lie in Their eyes. They knew this would happen. They knew I would be left alive, with no choice but to join Them. They say Viridian will be better this way, our magic broken and tattered. They say it’s the only way our world will survive. Survive what? It’s already seen the worst calamity it will ever know, and all at Their hands.
I will go with Them. I must. They did this to claim me, whatever They say otherwise. I will go with Them, I will learn Their secrets, and I will make Them regret it. I will make Them pay.
There was more, but Saenu couldn’t bare to read it. Through Gaesten’s ramblings, she could read well enough between the lines. Wayfarers had come to his world and destroyed it with a plague, all in the name of recruiting him to their ranks. They would have offered him this new life first, of course, but if he’d refused? Saenu knew her own kind too well to believe they’d simply walk away from a promising candidate, not when suitable Kin were so few and far between.
But Gaesten knew what they’d done. He’d known from the very beginning, and had learnt their arts with the sole intention of using them against his teachers. Through their own hubris, the Kin had brought a destructive force into their ranks that hadn’t been assuaged.
Saenu slammed the book shut. Stupidity, and arrogance, to think they could tame someone who’d lost what Gaesten had lost. But that was the way of the Kin, wasn’t it? To believe they weren’t just servants of the Nexus, but its rulers. At least, whoever had done this to Gaesten believed it.
And still, after all these years, Gaesten wanted nothing more than to destroy worlds. Given what had been done to him, Saenu could hardly blame him. That didn’t make his actions any better, but... She understood.
Carefully, Saenu slid the book back onto the shelf beside the pool and stepped away. Gaesten was still out there, pursuing a vengeance that would never end. The years hadn’t calmed his rage - he’d pull the very Nexus apart, in the end. Well, he would if left to his own devices, and Saenu had no intention of allowing him that. All anger had to burn out eventually, and if it didn’t…
Saenu had no sword to grasp, but her hands closed into fists. She was a Wayfarer, a protector of worlds. She’d do her duty until her dying day, no matter the enemy, or the cost. It was simply who she was, and no rogue Kin would ever stop her.