The Claim Adjusters Guide to the Apocalyse

Pt. 1 - The Library

There was no place in the world where Emrys was more himself than in a library, and he had begun, over the last several days, to resent it bitterly. Because it meant he no longer had anywhere to hide from the discovery that he could not concentrate in one.

Alaric's was the finest he had ever been let into, and Emrys had been let into most of the ones worth the trouble. It went back further than the lamplight reached, a thousand years of keeping gathered into one long vaulted dark, shelf behind shelf behind shelf until the eye gave up and the mind simply agreed there was more. It smelled of the three things that had ever reliably steadied him: old paper, cold stone, and the particular dust of leather bindings slowly returning to the earth. The cold of Wystan lived in it, so that they worked in coats and fingerless gloves and the small gold weather of a single lamp each, two islands of light in an archive built for a hundred. And it was, by a wide and lonely margin, the only room he had ever walked into and felt his shoulders come down from around his ears.

Because here, alone among the books and scrolls, Emrys was good.

The thing that made him a catastrophe everywhere else, a mind that ran downhill past every reasonable stopping place, that could not leave a thread unpulled or an idea unfollowed into whatever dark it wandered toward, was, between these shelves, not a defect but the entire qualification. He could read six dead tongues and bully a seventh into sense. He could hold the shape of an argument across four hundred pages and feel the one place it contradicted itself three chapters back. He could walk into a thousand years of unsorted grief disguised as paperwork and know, by the weight of a volume and the hand it was written in, roughly when it had been set down and roughly how much it had cost the setter. Give Emrys a question and an impossible quantity of books, and he was, for once in his ruined life, exactly the right instrument for the work. The only task the magnificent useless engine of his had ever been handed that it could complete without setting something on fire.

Which ought to have made the last several days the happiest of his recent memory.

It had not, on account of the claims adjuster.

She sat three tables down, where she had sat since the first morning, drowning in her two cardigans and coat, a pencil behind her ear and a second, he happened to know, having watched it happen, lost somewhere in the engineering of the knot at her neck. She was working through the disbursement-era ledgers with the flat, total patience of a woman defusing something, and she did not fidget, and she did not sigh, and she turned her pages at long even intervals and made her small even notes, and was, by every measurable property, the least distracting object in a room that contained the collected magical thought of a thousand years.

Emrys had not finished a page in an hour.

He had a theory about it, because he had a theory about everything; the having of theories was the whole of what he was about. His mind had been trained from the nursery to fasten on the anomaly, the flaw in the ward, the wrongness in the weave, the single element in a closed system behaving as it had no business behaving, and to hold there, helpless and humming, until the thing gave up its secret. And Valka Harrow was, he had concluded somewhere around the first afternoon and spent every afternoon since failing to un-conclude, the most comprehensively anomalous object in the building.

Consider the data, he told himself, in the reasonable voice he used for the things he least wished to look at directly. A woman builds herself, with evident care, to be overlooked. Two cardigans the colour of a wet Thursday. A coat in the same shade that had seen better days. A stillness practised, he assumed, until it passed for absence. She walks into the greatest library in the realm and notices the bookshelves instead of the books. And then, this was the part his attention snagged on and would not release, she opens a four-hundred-year-old disbursement ledger that nine generations of keepers had filed under dull, and inside the first quarter hour she finds a thing the keepers missed, and she does not look pleased about it, she looks vindicated that what she had seen in her file was here also. The brief grim satisfaction of a woman whose low opinion of the world has been confirmed once again on schedule. The surface said grey municipal nobody. Everything underneath the surface said something else entirely, and she had simply elected, at some early point, to keep all of it for herself.

It was, he maintained, purely a structural interest. He was drawn to the discrepancy because he was always drawn to discrepancies. The fact that the discrepancy had a particular way of tucking a strand of hair behind one ear when she was concentrating, and that he had begun to find the gesture more compelling than anything written down in a thousand years, was, he assured himself, turning resolutely back to his own page, beside the point, and very probably the cold.

"You're doing it again," she said, without looking up.

His heart performed an undignified manoeuvre. "Doing what."

"Staring into the dark abyss behind me." She turned a page. "Either you've found something or you've lost the thread. Which."

He had lost the thread. The thread was three tables away, defusing a ledger. "Neither," he said. "I am thinking."

"You think out loud, and it's been very quiet." She still had not looked up, and there was something at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile. "I assumed you'd died."

"I am pacing myself."

"Mm," said Valka Harrow, in the tone of a woman filing a claim under implausible, and went back to her ledger, and Emrys discovered that he was, helplessly, grinning at his own book like a fool, and bent his head lower so that the lamp would not give him away.

This was new. He turned it over warily, the way he turned over any phenomenon that behaved against its rules. He had spent a long time now in the company of cold, beautiful, composed people, in cold and beautiful and composed rooms, and the chief virtue of all of them was that they asked nothing of him and gave nothing back, and a man could rest in that, the way you rest in a cool room on a brutal day. He had built a life on the discovery that he was only ever safe when nothing in the room could reach him.

Nothing about the claims adjuster was cold, and she could reach him from three tables off without appearing to try, and the genuinely alarming part was that he did not, in her vicinity, want to be safe.

•°•○•°•

She brought him the hard ones.

That had become the shape of the work, somewhere in the first days, without either of them proposing it: she ranged through the institutional records, the ledgers and rolls and disbursement books, where her particular gift, the catching of the figure that would not sit, the seam in a story that ran smooth to every other eye, and did the labour of forty clerks. And when she struck a thing she could not read, a passage in old liturgical script, a marginal hand four centuries dead, a reference that assumed a knowledge no longer issued, she carried it down the length of the library and set it in front of him.

"This one," she said, doing it now, and laid an open volume across his page. Her sleeve smelled of ink and, faintly, of woodsmoke, as though she warmed herself at a fire before entering the library. "I can read the words. They don't mean anything in this order. Tell me what it's pretending not to say."

And there it was again. The thing he had no defence prepared for, the thing that undid him more thoroughly than any beauty ever had. She did not hand him the book because his blood was old, or because his family was the kind that opened doors, or because his name married well. She handed it to him because his mind was the sharpest tool for the task and she had a task and she was a woman who used the right tool. She wanted the one part of him the world had always quietly set aside in favour of the packaging. She had no apparent interest in the packaging at all.

Emrys had been wanted his entire life and seen by almost no one, wanted for his name and his connections by people climbing toward something, found wanting by everyone level with him. And he had not understood, until a grey woman started handing him dead languages because she trusted him to read them, how starved a person could get for the difference.

He read the passage. It was a keeper's note, third or fourth century of the office, complaining in the eternal voice of middle management about a discrepancy in the solstice rolls. He translated it for her, and watched her almost at once go still in the particular way that meant her mind had walked off down a corridor he couldn't see. And he found that he had stopped his own reading again, and was instead watching Valka Harrow think, which had become, over these several days, his favourite thing in the library, and the library contained the assembled wonder of a thousand years.

"You're staring again," she said slowly as she gathered her volume.

"You're interesting to watch when you work," he answered, before the better-defended part of him could intervene, and then heard it land in the lamplit air between them, far too plain, stripped of every protective clause his sentences usually came armoured in.

For exactly one moment she looked up and met his eyes, and the practised absence was not in her face, and what was there instead he did not get to read, because she put it away. He watched her put it away, watched the shutter come down with the speed of long habit and said, dry as a struck match, "Your page is going cold," and turned to go back to her spot three tables down.

But the back of her neck, as she walked away, above the cardigan, had gone faintly pink. He noticed.

He noticed, too, that he was not the only one in the room conducting a study and pretending not to.

•°•○•°•

It happened later, when the lamps had burned low and the cold had crept down another degree and they had both, without admitting to it, declined three separate sensible hours ago to leave.

She had found something, a thread worth pulling, and had come round to his side of the table to lay two volumes open together, the disbursement figure in one and the keeper's gloss in the other, so that he could see the join she'd seen. They bent over the books at the same moment. Her shoulder came to rest against his arm, not by design, simply the geometry of two people reading one small pool of lamplight, and she did not move it away, being absorbed, and he did not move it away, being, he would have said, had anyone asked, and prayed no one ever would, cold.

And his channel opened.

Not far. Not the great ruinous flood that took the curtains and the desks and his composure; only a flicker, a stir, the smallest possible portion of the thing that had not stirred for him in the bed of a cold woman in a year. A warmth came up through his hands where they rested on the page, and the nearest lamp leaned toward him and brightened, the flame standing suddenly tall and gold, and a curl of heat moved across the back of his neck like a breath.

He shut it. Slammed it, the way he had learned to slam it, all those wasted years of learning to be empty. The flame dropped, and the warmth drained back down into wherever it waited, and Valka, mercifully, had been looking at the books and not at the lamp.

But he sat with his heart going, staring at the steadied flame, because the thing about Emrys's magic, the single reliable thing in the whole unreliable catastrophe of it, was that it did not stir for nothing. It stirred when he was frightened, or shamed, or, in the old days, before he had trained the capacity out of himself, when he was moved. Which was why he struggled to control it.

And it had just woken, gently, over a shared ledger, because a woman in two cardigans and a coat had leaned her shoulder against his arm.

He did not let himself follow the thought. He was, after all, a man who could not leave a thread unpulled. Except this one, which he set down very carefully, and did not pull, because he had a clear and animal sense that whatever was tied to its other end would, if he ever once let himself draw it into the light, take the rest of his life apart.

"You've gone quiet again," Valka said, not unkindly, still reading. "Is it the script?"

"It's the script," Emrys lied, and bent back over the books, and stayed exactly where he was, with her shoulder warm against his arm and the end of the world ticking down somewhere underneath them and the lamp standing tall and gold above the page, and was, for the length of one stolen hour, in the cold heart of the oldest library in the realm, hunting a doom he could not stop with a woman who had no idea what she was doing to him, appallingly, dangerously, wordlessly happy.

He would have to do something about it. A man in his position, with his particular affliction, could not afford to feel things; feeling things, in his case, had a way of catching the furniture on fire.

He would deal with it tomorrow. He had been intending to deal with it tomorrow for several days now.