Black Jade

'What do you call this place?'

'It is only the reading room,' Abrasax told him. He turned to step through the doorway into the passage beyond. 'This is the library.'

We followed him down an unlit stone corridor. A soft radiance suffused the opening twenty yards ahead of us. The Masters passed through this opening, out into the chamber beyond, and then so did I. I shook my head in disbelief. My belly fairly fluttered up into my throat as if I had jumped off a cliff into a pool, for I found myself gazing out into a vast, open space so deep that I did not want to look down for its bottom. I gathered with my friends and the Masters in a sort of loggia affording a view of this immense cavern. It was good that stone railings had been built at the edge of the loggia; otherwise it would have been easy for anyone, sick with the heights, to step off the edge and plunge downward-

'Oh, Lord!' Maram said as he looked out over the railing. 'Oh, Lord!'

The loggia proved to be part of the uppermost tier carved into the rock of this cylindrical pit and running around its circumference. It seemed half a mile, as a bird might fly, straight across to the tier's other side. There were many, many tiers: two hundred eighty-four, as Abrasax told us. Bands of rock separated each tier, and glowed with a pearly substance that could only be some sort of gelstei. It provided a soft, white light that illumined the entire library and its many books.

There must have been millions of them. Each tier, twelve feet high, contained ten shelves which had been carved as even deeper recesses into the cavern's solid rock. As with any library, books packed each shelf. Abrasax led us out of the loggia into the first tier, and I ran my hand across the bindings of the old books. All were of leather and paper, and seemed no different from any of the other books that I had read. And they were all, in this section of this tier, as I could see from their titles, copies of various versions of the Saganom Elu or commentaries upon it. I had never dreamed that so much could have been written about this Book of Books, neatly arrayed on smooth, granite shelves curving off nearly to infinity.

'I can see,' Master Juwain said to Abrasax, 'how a book might become lost here. If all the levels contain as many volumes as this one, there must be more than thirty million books!'

'There are forty million, ten thousand and forty-three,' Abrasax informed us with a smile. 'To be precise.'

'But that is more than the Great Library held!'

'It is. But we Brothers have had longer to collect our books than did Khaisham's Librarians.'

'But how did you acquire so many, Grandfather? And where are the crystal books that you call the vedastei? And who built your library, and how was it made?'

Master Juwain had other questions for Abrasax, which Abrasax tried to answer as he led us back into the loggia, and then down a flight of stone stairs connecting to a loggia on the second tier.

'None of us,' Abrasax said, nodding at Master Storr and Master Yasul, 'has been able to determine who built this library. When our order established itself here in the Age of Law, Grandmaster Teodorik discovered the library much as you see it today. It is possible that the Aymaniri — they call themselves the Ymanir now — melted out this cavern with firestones even before they built Agarttha. Or it might be older still: much, much older. Some of us believe it might be a wonder from the Elder Ages.'

'But the books,' Master Juwain said, 'cannot date from the Elder Ages!'

We had passed down to the eighth tier, and Master Juwain's hand swept out as he pointed outside the loggia at ancient tomes recording the Epic of Kalkamesh, the Gest ofNodin and Yurieth and other famous narratives, which were very much part of Eaean history.

'No, you are correct,' Abrasax said to Master Juwain. 'These books we have gathered from across the world like any others. But it may be that the vedastei are not of this world.'

He led us down ten more tiers, and the sound of our boots slapping against stone steps vanished into the immense open space of the library. I could almost hear Maram formulatmg his complaints as to the inevitable climb back up the many stairways. He must have wondered, as did I, if the library's makers had indeed been angels who could simply fly from tier to tier. It would have required hours, I thought, to retrieve a book from the lowest tiers and make the arduous climb back up into the reading room. As I watched Master Yasul and Master Virang follow Abrasax effortlessly down the stairways, it came to me that Brothers had endless hours and years to go about their work — and nearly bottomless stamina.

We made our way down to the twentieth and then the twenty-fifth tier. Here the books of leather and paper gave way to those made from crystal. Abrasax told us that most of the books on these levels, as far as the Brothers had been able to determine, were of poetry and songs. At last we came out into a loggia on the thirty-third tier. Abrasax led the way out Onto this narrow curve of stone. We walked in near-silence past shelves of the marvelous vedastei. I could not guess at their subjects, for I could not read the script engraved into their colored and lacquered covers.

'Ah, I've never seen so many damn books!' Maram murmured to me. 'Not even in the Great Library.'

We moved through two more of the twelve loggias on this tier. Then we came out upon a section of shelves, all of whose books bore the same title. Abrasax pulled one of them off its shelf, and he traced his finger along the golden characters etched into its blue cover. Then he said to us a single word: 'Skaadarak.'

'Do you mean, the Skardarak?' Master Juwain said to him, carefully pronouncing the name of the great doom at the end of time when the universe would fall into a final dark age.

'Perhaps,' Abrasax said. 'You see, we have been able to translate the book's title, but its contents remain unknown to us.'

He opened the book and flipped through its hundreds of fine crystal pages. They remained as blank as sheets of ice.

'But can't you just unlock it?' Maram called out.

'We cannot. We have tried, and we shall continue to try, but we have been able to discover keys for only a fraction of the vedastei.'

He went on to tell us that the Brothers had discovered word keys for perhaps three thousand of the vedastei, and most of these were located on the higher tiers.

'All these books,' he said as his hand swept along the shelf, 'are a mystery to us.'

He looked out over the stone railing down into the glowing pit that made up the rest of the library. 'The books below this level remain unread, and all are vedastei, going down to the one hundred and twenty-first level.'

'And below that?' Master Juwain asked.

'Below that, there are no books.'

'But you said that there were two hundred and eighty-four levels?'

'There are, indeed. And most of their shelves stand empty.'

'But why? Did the library's makers hope to acquire so many more books?'

'We don't know,' Abrasax said. Then he held up his precious vedastei. 'Just as we don't know what lies within this book.'

Master Juwain nodded his head at this, and said, 'If the vedastei were truly written in the Elder Ages and brought to Ea, then how is it you believe that one of them might tell of some danger of the Acadian forest of our time?'

Master Yasul, the Brotherhood's greatest remembrancer, answered for Abrasax, saying, 'It may be that some of the vedastei were not actually written. With a few of the books that we have managed to open, we've had the experience of the text changing upon different readings, according to different knowledge that we were seeking and different questions that we held in our minds. Indeed, it might be more accurate to say that we don't read the vedastei as much as they read us.'

He went on to say that the vedastei might somehow transmit the Akashic Records, which was a sort of memory of all that had ever occurred in the universe.

'Ah, there are certain things that should never be recorded,' Maram said as he eyed the book that Abrasax held in his hand. 'And never read by another, if you know what I mean.'

Abrasax smiled at Maram. 'You needn't fear that anyone will learn of your exploits in this book — unless it is your valor in facing the unknown.'

Abrasax put it back on its shelf, then turned to Estrella, who stood with Daj near the railing as they looked out into the library. He said to her, 'We have reason to believe that one of these books entitled, Skaadarak, contains the knowledge we seek. Would you be willing to try to locate it for