Chapter 54 – The Guardians’ Judgment

The emptiness was scented with the stench of aged paper and cold metal, a scent Yusuf had known in cellar rooms heavy with unopened boxes and the dusty museum warehouse where he had worked. That far-off memory pained him; memory, even memory for pain, was a kind of weather to which he'd become accustomed. But here the weather had turned bad.

The Guardians did not leap like armies had leaped up — with drums and banners. They conformed like reasons: persuasive, urgent, hammered out of arguments' memory had used against itself. They were tall, naturally, but more intimidating for the way their surfaces modified. A face on one's can be a devastation on another's forearm; a hand, a river in midcurrent. Light coursed through them in veins. When they did speak, they spoke in textures: stone grinding, leaves rustling, the cracked dryness of an old spine splitting.

The Codex pulsed against the hip of Yusuf, hot and compact like a breathing insect. He had wished for its heat to enfold him; now it was a splinter of bone. Behind him, the vacant child stood frozen, holding a little scroll to its chest. It did not shift to help, but shifted its head once, as if embracing the battle to be now, or not be.

One of the Guardians stepped forward a pace, its chest emblazoned with memorial tiles provided by veterans, one for every face set in stone in the middle of a sentence. When it spoke, voice came as if reading from a long-shut ledger.

"Remembrance," he read in his head before the Guardian was finished. The figure's voice imposed on him levels of remembrance — not as images at first, but pressure. Remembrance as pressure. Remembrance as pressure of hands on shoulders, shrieks down corridors. Yusuf experienced moments of his life being summoned like pages. For a mad moment, he thought he was being read out.

His life was crowded with faces. Courtyard urchins he'd passed in the street, shopkeepers who'd sold him goods in other shards' bazaars, men and women who'd farewelled him with one naked word of understanding before they vanished. The faces were not paintings; they breathed on his chest. Every memory was an eddy that drew him in.

The Guardian flung its hand and splinters — pieces of colored glass and lettered tiles — shattered from its shape and flew like knives. Yusuf moved on reflex: roll, slash, shove the Codex-back. Every shard he struck vaporized into ink smoke, but for every one that did, another appeared. Its slashes in his flesh weren't bleeding; they were blanking — little blanks where names had been and now weren't. The first cut out the name of a children's nursery rhyme; the second sucked the color out of a little, inward joke he'd made to Rae in a devastated building. Yusuf felt loss like toothache. That was what it was, the pain of something gone.

He struck the Guardian's chest. Where palm touched mosaic, light burst — his memories, thrown back. For a moment, air was thick with coffee and books, and the Guardian roared like a bell. It burst, and its shards burst into the nothing, pouring out into motes of history. Yusuf reeled, winded. One lost. A few of his spaces still wept voids, but the tide had turned for a little while.

"Don't fail," the secret child breathed against his spine. It did not say it quickly, and therefore the words were a warning, not to Yusuf — but to the world.

The second Guardian fell like a cliff to ruins. Where the first had fallen in faces and shards, this one in bones and memorials. It was built as a sheaf of basalt stacked, gates and pillars funneling into the form of a man. Chains were wrapped around its arms; each link a name bent through a devastated city.

"You carry the weight of empires," it stated. Its voice ordered, not inquired. "You imagine speaking cleanses the dead. You imagine a book acquits. Who do you think can wrap up the world like a shawl?"

Its chain broke. A loop wrapped around Yusuf's calf and dragged him off the ground. For a confused moment the world was not defined by world — only the sensation of being pulled up and laid out every ruin he'd ever struggled to equate: war-shuttered libraries, children who'd learned individual lessons from his hands and lost them, statues whose faces were planed. The pull of the sentence flattened memory onto bone. Yusuf was as if his material were squeezed out of his head and dumped on the pages.

Rae's name was stretched out to him then, like a spark in ashes. No noise, not exactly, but only the echo, and it burned his lungs. "Don't give them what they want," he heard her say, one word suspended between breath and intent. It was small. It was, in this moment, everything.

He yelled her name down the chain and with the yell something inside the Codex grunted open like a door. Invasions of ink spilled out; they dripped across onto a rough hook and wrapped around the chain. He pulled. The chain snapped with the yell of a mountain ripped from foundations. The Guardian's face, a thousand chiseled rulers, snapped and fell like a wall ripped from hinges.

He had minutes to catch his breath and seconds before the rest came. The thin air was kind; the Guardians were not.

When the third came — a monstrous form of smoke and wind — Yusuf's clothes were charred and his limbs thudded with divine pains. It was like fire, and where it went the air crackled as if it read a sentence in reverse. It was speaking of dissolution and natural decay of things: ash to earth, ruins to dust. "Why should anything survive?" it asked. "You force what should return to the earth to stay like a building.

The world is made of remembering and forgetting."

No-flesh fire coursed through Yusuf's body; where it touched, memory blazed into flame and was extinguished. He recognized the arc of things peeling off — Rae's fingers curled over in a particular fashion, his own laughter, the very smell of a certain book. They were little things, he told himself; but they were the stitches his self stitched itself together with. To lose them was to have cloth tear at the seams. He traced his hand along the Codex. The book retaliated, demanding a sheen like an old map of rivers, water's writing written on his palms and condensing the smoke into steam. He moved stealthily forward, then again, and out of that line of memory he carved wind into armor. He pushed onward, and the third Guardian's face was his own: his doubt, his sleepless nights reading pages.

He carried memory like a spear, and for an ugly, blinding moment the form of smoke collapsed into a huddle of smoldering regrets.

The Guardians' blows had been blows and not punches. They were questions. They made him answer not in the world of what he thought but in the world of what he did think: whether memory accuses or forgives, whether remembrance is reverence or repudiation against things to fall apart.

"Because I have to," he said as they surrounded him, their movements a battery of echoing redundancies. Where it moved ahead, there were action echoes left behind — not sonic ones but repeat echoes. A fended sword replicated to a dozen; opening a door repeated and repeated so much that opening became a quotidian concept. Repetition's realm was weariness. It assailed him in loops: a kid reaching for a toy over and over again but never quite getting it, and the looped form of his father exiting out a door after a rebuke; each repetition a tiny subtraction of meaning. Yusuf's own actions were being looped back on him, minor mistakes inflated by a dozen runs-through until he was stumbling where he was supposed to walk with confidence. Every sidestep attempted into another sword. Blinded by sweat.

It seemed for a fleeting moment as if his own history would be the force that defeated him — every mistake magnified into an age.

Silence ensued, a Guardian constructed of a shutter. As it entered his domain air pulled sound out of him. No fear for fear holds voice; only the strangling realization that everything that he ever said could be torn silent and then be gone. No memories; no echoes; no residuum. It is one thing, Yusuf realized, to be forgotten; another not to have been at all.

Burden at last fell upon him like a mountain. Memorials and associations again, but heavier than in those days: not rubble, but duty, obligation, responsibility. The Guardian loomed over him with the faces of saved citizens and the faces of unrescued citizens, and the weight of deeds — of omission — tugged at his shoulders. Every step the sort of work that made his knees creak like ropes.

Something in Yusuf began to smolder low with desperation. The Codex became hot in his hands; its ink splattered across pages of its own volition. Blank spots and scuffs scattered his thoughts at his feet. He could not hold on to everything that was being taken away from him. Names slipped away like smooth stones.

And then, as lightly carried on a field afar, Rae's voice entwined in.

"Yusuf… don't stop."

It was a bell that had rung far and deep. The stillness attempted to engulf it, but Rae's whispering, thin voice, otherworldly, pierced the shut stillness. Yusuf's body cut off the thread. He would have fallen then. He did not.

He began to struggle, not involuntarily but of his own accord. Memory is an act; he had to do it in order to make it be.

He began, deliberately, to loop all the Guardians on itself. Where Remembrance had overwhelmed him, he made a fountain — he flung open his wounds wide and let the borrowed memories be a projectile, shooting them as flares onto the robes of the Guardians. They blazed, and for an instant the cloth of faces which had sung over him was suspended. When Forgetting tripped on a step in his path, he stepped into the gap and utilized its emptiness as cover; in the pit there, he struck rapidly and wounded its leg. Distortion twisted space into knots; Yusuf found the knot and unraveled it, and the Guardian lost its footing. Repetition was hardest; its echoed blows were clumsy and almost mechanical. Yusuf did something more absurd than any loop he considered — he crashed on purpose, allowed the cycle to devour itself by giving the pattern more than it could handle so that it overwhelmed. Silence took a form of inner bellowing that he didn't even know he was capable of; he clung to the rhythm of Rae's voice, his father's acid words, to the creak of the Codex's spine, and used them as a beat that compelled sound into being.

To Burden he staggered, and then growled; he threw the chain it sprang into a pendulum and used its swing to fling the Guardian's own weight back onto itself.

It was brutal work — not pretty sword fighting but grim survival, things of memory stitched together into atrocity. The Guardians broke, their swords dissolving. Not killed — the Root would not be so easily defeated — but broken, to re-think.

When the youngest of them took a backward step, when their voices dropped in unison to the same joint decision, Yusuf went to his knees, snowflakes of blood on his cheeks, his fingers damp with the ink of the Codex and the moisture of his own sweat.

"Not yet," said the six as one. "Not yet, Archivist. The Tree remains. It will not pardon."

Its form unbuilt into slivers that drifted up, into the ceiling of the void. The earth beneath Yusuf trembled — a response, a recognition. Faceless child knelt and, hands unsoft yet, caught Yusuf who toppled over whole. It stood him up with a movement very nearly gentle. The Codex in its hand burst a fierce, small green.

Nearer, the Codex breathed. Nearer. Nearer.

Yusuf breathed in through parched lips and looked beyond the child. The Tree loomed already bent and closer than it was yesterday, its trunk distended, its arms embracing a cathedral of ruins. Cities floated like baubles, hollow and spinning. The Tree's light was not soft; it was ravenous and merciless. He had lived through the judgment. The Root had spoken instead of banishing him. That was some kind of permission, and it trembled in him like a coin that accepted him. But at what expense. Rae's voice had arrived and had been his anchor — and now, where the Codex's ink smoldered and his hands trembled, he felt the resonance of her summons fade. Her syllables left the air like fading embers.

For an instant he thought of screaming for her, but there was so much silence.

He did not know if he had lost something more than his body could lose, or if there would be minutes to spare in which to make other deals, to wrest others from the ledgers. The emptiness was no solace. It only offered choices.

"Close," the Codex insisted, one word one small order and one oath. Yusuf took a look at it. The Tree would not be merciful.

He stood up, shaking hands, and stuffed his boot in the general vicinity of the path that wound into the roots. Each step an unmaking — the hollow gave him a push as if trying to shove the past out of him — but he kept going.

Behind him the faceless child stood with eyes he could almost look into, and for an instant of terror Yusuf thought the child was judge and keeper and servant at shift's end. The child's white face leaned in. It did not vow.

Yusuf cradled the Codex in his hands like it was a prayer. He didn't know whether he had enough. He stepped into the shadow of the Tree. The universe breathed in.