They left a blue-faced priest of Potipur at the head of the alley to keep watch, but he got bored with the waiting and fell asleep. Most priests were fat face-stuffers anyhow, half-asleep on their feet a good part of the time. Tharius had stared down at die pile of books, silent as a stalking stilt-lizard, judging how many of them he might take away and how long he had. His own attic room was at the top of a drainpipe, and getting them back would be a difficulty. . . .
Inspiration struck him, all at once. He found a sack, put all his owji books in it, hung it over his shoulder, and climbed down the protruding drainpipe, his favorite road to freedom. The exchange was quick—his dull books for the ones in the alley—and he was back up the drainpipe again, sweating and hauling for all he was worth, hearing the creak of the wagon wheels even as he slid over the parapet onto the roof beside his own window.
When the wagon arrived, the books were loaded by some flunky who did not even look at them. From the roof, Tharius watched him as he took them down to the stone wharf at the Riverside and burned them. Everyone pretended not to notice, even one old man who was choked by the smoke and had to act as though it were from something else. So. There were books, and books. The forbidden books went on the shelf in the corner, just where the others had been. No one ever came up here except Grandmother Stife, once a month or so, to peek in the door and then shout at him to sweep the place out.
Tharius was hooked, confirmed in rebellion. The books were real ones. Stories of people as they were. A history of Northshore. A little book about the arrival, called When We Came. Tharius had been taught certain things as true, but they had always seemed senseless. Now, suddenly they began to connect.
Time went. Tharius became a book collector. Hidden in the attics of the Don home was a collection that would have condemned all the family to death had an Awakener got wind of it. Tharius found them in other attics, entering from the roofs, prowling dusty spaces by lantern light, old, shut-up places where no one came anymore but where books were sometimes found. In corners. Under floorboards. He found them in houses where people died, before the Awakeners or the kinfolk came to take inventory. He found them in the rag man’s yard, buried at the bottom of stacks of old clothes. Fragments more often than whole volumes, but of whole volumes, three or four a year, perhaps. By the time he was eighteen and subject to the procreation laws, he had almost thirty of them.
Which was bad enough in itself. Worse, so far as Tharius was concerned, was the fact that in these thirty books were references to hundreds of others. Somewhere on Northshore there were, or had been, more!
Sometimes late at night, when the moons lit the alleyway, Tharius Don had a waking dream of all those books. More and more. All the answers to all the questions anyone had ever asked would be there in the books.
And the books, he was convinced, were in the Towers. Why else would the Awakeners be so agitated about books, if it were not some kind of secret knowledge only they were supposed to have? Knowledge about how things really were. How things used to be. How they had been in some other place before humans had come here.
Influenced by a bit too much wine, Tharius broached that subject at dinner one night, hearing the words fall into a horrified silence.
“Before what?” his father snarled. “Before what?”
“Before humans came to Northshore,” Tharius stuttered.
“Where did you get an ugly idea like that?”
“I just—I just thought we must have come from somewhere else, you know. Because there are so many things we can’t eat.” Even in his half-drunken surprise at the words that had come from his own mouth, he was wary enough not to mention the books. “It seemed obvious. . . .”