*
THE BAR-SELEHM PUBLIC LIBRARY was one of the city’s gems, a domed and colonnaded monument to egalitarian principles the region remembered only partially. It had wide doors, and though from time to time, powerful people had tried to make them narrow, they had survived the attempt, rooted as they were in what had once been so obviously right that they had come to stand for both progress and tradition. It was, perhaps, the only place in the city where you might see whites, blacks, and Lani, irrespective of class or gender, in the same room.
They knew me in the library. Vestris had gotten me my first library card when I was seven, and my record was immaculate. No lost books. No fines. Nothing overdue. It was amazing how disciplined you could be when you knew that there was no one to bail you out of trouble. But my addiction was to novels, not history, and certainly not military records. I spent a long moment studying an unhelpful floor plan and then scanned for someone familiar.
Miss Fischer was an elderly white lady who had worked there longer than I could remember. She was thin, austere-looking, her hair in a tight silver bun, her eyes peering over gold-rimmed reading glasses that she wore on a chain around her neck. Her dress was vaguely funereal, and she was the kind of person you could not imagine anywhere but inside the library’s strictly maintained silence. She watched my approach with the stillness of a heron in the reeds where frogs abounded.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Miss Sutonga,” said Miss Fischer, taking in my slashed and bruised face, “so nice to see you are out of jail.” She said it without inflection, and I colored under her fixed gaze.
“You saw the paper,” I said. “They got the wrong end of the stick.”
“It would not be the first time,” said the librarian. “I assume you have come to read rather than practice your climbing.”
“Yes, Miss Fischer,” I said.
“And you were looking for a recommendation?”
“Actually,” I said, “I am looking for two things. First, where can I see details of recent real estate transactions?”
The heron stirred fractionally, as if something unexpected had swum into view. “We have listings of house sales by county—” she began, but I cut her off.
“I was thinking more of land outside the city,” I said.
The Mahweni didn’t want to go to war with the Grappoli, I reasoned, but that wasn’t all they were protesting. There were rumors of land deals, ancestral territory sold off to the highest bidder. But sold off to who? And was the Beacon somehow a factor in the trade? Were the Grappoli? I had been treating all these things as separate issues, but what if they weren’t? What if this was finally about something ordinary but important: something that fell squarely under the control of Colonel Archibald Mandel, Secretary of Trade? What if the Beacon was the center of something much larger, something people were prepared not just to commit murder over, but which would drive us to war and annihilation?
Again, Miss Fischer’s movement was fractional, a contracting of her eyebrows. She was intrigued but would not dream of asking.
“Fourth floor,” she said. “Cartography. What some of our less erudite visitors call ‘the map room.’ The Regional Transactions card catalog there cross lists sales by date and region.”
“Thank you,” I said. “You have been most helpful.”
“It is the nature of my job, Miss Sutonga, if not my personality. Is there any other assistance I can offer?”
“I’ll need to look at regimental memorabilia as well,” I said. “But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
Miss Fischer maintained her level stare. “So long as crossing bridges doesn’t lead to you scaling the masonry or falling through the ceiling,” she said.
“You can’t believe everything you read, Miss Fischer,” I said.
“Yes, thank you for that,” she answered. “Being a librarian, I had no idea that print was not always reliable. Do come back if you find you need books on flower arranging or how to assemble a steam engine, won’t you? Your interests have become so diverse of late.”
It was, I think, as close to a joke as Miss Fischer ever came, and I shot her a quick, if slightly abashed, smile before heading upstairs.
*