"My dear!" The door opened wide and all of Yicor's face was washed in lamplight. "Now this is the kind of surprise I wish I had more of."
"Thank you, Yicor. I hope I'm not intruding."
"You, my dear, could never." He stepped from the door. "Please, come in from the dark."
I didn't mention that it was, in fact, darker inside his shop.
He shut the door and I waited a moment for him to light an old portable gas lamp.
"Come through, come through." He led me down the shelves, his lamp bobbing like a firefly. "Is everything all right, my dear?"
I hesitated a moment, and blurted out, "Did you find a home for it? The book I sold you."
He placed the lamp on his desk. The face he turned to me was piteous and full of compassion. "I did, if it helps you to know. Somewhere it will be treasured."
I nodded, more than a little surprised by how relieved that made me feel.
He added, "But I'm certain that is not the reason you are here."
No, it wasn't. "Valya suggested I speak to you."
"Good woman, that one."
"Yes, she is."
"Obsessed with food, though."
That made me grin. "So it's not only me then."
With a chuckle, Yicor patted his generous stomach. "Not in the least."
"She thought you could help me. You see, I'm looking for answers."
"Answers?" Yicor's eyes left my face, travelled too casually over the shelves we had passed to rest on the ceiling.
"And Valya told me to ask for your help."
"Did she?" he asked.
"She said you'd be happy to give it."
Yicor stood rigid a moment longer. Then he released a great sigh; his shoulders sagged. "Valya is a good woman. She knows who to trust. If she sent you here, then she had her reasons. I won't argue with her."
Who to trust? Why did I feel like there was a conversation going on that I couldn't hear? Hidden meanings behind innocuous words?
"Come with me." Yicor collected his lamp from the desk again, and headed into the forest of shelves, junk and dust.
He did not take me to the door. The shelves turned around on themselves, became a maze that spread deep into the shop. More deeply than I had realised it had space to go. When we got to a point where I was thoroughly lost, and quite convinced that I could wander here until I starved to death, Yicor stopped. He put the lantern on the floor beside a rug. He flipped the mat up by its corners to reveal a trapdoor in the floor.
He gripped a large iron ring and hauled the door open. The room below was small, walls cut from earth, ceiling low and supported by wooden beams.
"Down you get."
I stared at him in sudden panic. What was he about to do? Lock me in this hidden cell?
But he shook his head. "I'm not about to hurt you, my dear. If I wanted to, which I don't, it wouldn't be worth crossing Valya. She's a good woman, like I said, but Other's little curlies, she can be frightening. I'll hand you the light."
I gripped the edge of the trapdoor and climbed down. It wasn't much of a descent. Standing in the room, my head peeked out of the trapdoor and was about level with Yicor's shins.
Yicor said, "Here."
I accepted the lamp.
"You call when you've found what you were after, and I'll come get you. Coffee drinker?"
I nodded, still not sure what to say.
"I'll boil us a pot." Then Yicor left me, wandering into the darkness. It seemed he did not need the light to find his way.
Crouching, one hand braced on the floor and the other holding up the lamp, I turned into the room. It was longer than it had looked, although narrow and low. And it was full of books. They were stored on metal shelves, behind glass that reflected the lamp if I brought it too close. There was nowhere to sit, no room for a desk or a chair. Only books.
I shuffled further into the room, placed the lamp in an indent on the floor of packed earth so it would stay upright, and approached one of the cabinets. With a little effort the doors slid open. The books inside were clean, free of dust, earth, or damp. They felt new, leather soft, paper crinkly. How old were they, how precious, considering Yicor's rather extreme methods of keeping them?
And what could they tell me?
None of the spines were labelled. I drew one out, and the cover too was blank. I sat, conscious that the dirt would mark my jacket. I shivered. The earth was cold.
When I opened the cover I did not find words. Symbols rose at me from the page. Not imprinted in ink and applied with pressure on the vellum, they floated from the paper, hooked somehow into the weave but struggling always to escape. Like bubbles in black.
I shut the book with a snap that echoed through the room.
A breath and I opened it again. The symbols were still there, flattened by the board and leather, but rising gradually as though filling with air.
One symbol caught my attention. Smaller than the others, down at the very bottom of the right-hand corner. But I had seen it before. I had, I realised with a chill that had nothing to do with the cold, followed it. An eye stuck in a gate.
Lad's symbol.
What was Lad's symbol doing written in a strange bubbly I lost all feeling in my fingers and watched the book as it fell. It dropped gradually, like a feather, spreading over the packed earth in a smooth motion.
"Worked it out, have you?" Yicor was peering from the trapdoor, one hand holding onto the floor, the other gripping a steaming mug. I hadn't heard him approach, hadn't noticed footfalls on the wood above me.
"How?" I swallowed a multitude of questions that struggled in my throat; they fought each other to be voiced and choked me. "It's written in debris, isn't it?"
"Yes. Here-" he wiggled the mug "-you'll need it."
I crawled to the door and took the drink. "But how?"
"I don't know." His face was a mask. Impossible to tell if he was lying, if he was sincere. If he cared, or had any opinion at all. "That art is lost. Long gone. And so much else with it."
A viciously strong coffee smell smacked into my nose. It cleared my head. "What about the symbols?" I lifted my wrist. I had followed them, read them like a map. But if books were written using the things, then perhaps they meant more.
"No." Yicor, however, did not look at my suit. "I cannot read them. Another art lost with the revolution. Taken with our history, our dignity."
Then why was I inscribed with them? If none of us could read them, if even the technicians didn't know what they were for, then who had decided to use these symbols? And why?
"Our history?"
Yicor gave me a sad smile. "We did not always collect debris. And we had a language in those symbols, a language just for us. Traditions and ceremonies and more, gone from memory, lost from history. Before the revolution came. Before it brought the technicians, the national veche, and their twisted men."
"What good are the books, then?"
"Not all of them are written in cipher, my dear. Persevere." Yicor left. This time, his feet were heavy above me. They sent trickles of dust through the wooden ceiling.
Coffee in one hand, I crawled back awkwardly to the book. I dusted dirt from the cover. I flicked through more pages and found nothing but more bulging symbols. So I replaced the book and began my hunt.
The first book I found that I could read sent quivers into my stomach so fierce I had to swallow deep mouth fuls of coffee. The liquid was thick, so strong my head buzzed with each sip. The book was a long description of a ritual that, while I could understand the words themselves, made no sense to me. It ranted about invisible body parts – hands that were not, mouths that were not – and a way to connect with them that seemed to involve a barbaric level of violence. It sickened me to see something so brutal written about debris. I felt culpable, somehow. Because only collectors could have read those words, so only collectors had wanted to do the things they described. Collectors just like me, although I could never imagine myself driving a metal skewer into the head of a friend.