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The Stacks – Extract

A Black Library Imprint

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THE STACKS

Chris Winterton

Archivist-Praefectus Livia Tiro ground the heel of her hand into her eye socket, as though to drive wakefulness through her optic nerve and into her brain. Flashes of shifting, coloured shapes writhed through the darkness behind her eyelid. She had snatched only a handful of hours of sleep since the Library had received the Inquisition’s demand. Livia stretched, hard enough to crack her spine, though the ache in her shoulders remained unyielding, and continued her search of the overstuffed shelves that lined the room, a servo-skull tracking along them with her. They bulged with old books and fragile scrolls, sagging under the weight of the texts written by Livia’s predecessors in their attempts to document the Library’s contents. Livia had ransacked it all in search of any indication of the location of the tome the Holy Ordos demanded. Acidic ink had long since burnt the meaning out of the earliest, turning the pages to brittle fretwork. The later accounts were filled with errors and omissions, keyed to reference systems long since abandoned. Countless hours of work had narrowed the tome’s whereabouts down to the restricted section, but even that was a vast expanse. She’d dispatched the news to the searching archivists and continued her work in an attempt to truly pinpoint the tome’s location, activity serving as a bulwark against fevered panic.

She pulled a map from the shelves, unrolling the frail parchment on her desk atop the discarded books and charts already splayed across it. The malformed topography spread fresh cracks through the brittle paper. Her own doomed attempts at cartography made up the lowest strata of the accretion of falsehoods on her desk. Every document in the praefectus’ office was misleading to some greater or lesser degree, the Library’s contents growing too fast, within a structure too vast to be memorised, the already considerable area enclosed within the footprint of the Library walls multiplied many times over by the labyrinth of shelves that folded upon themselves in a geometric maze.

The latest map showed the Library’s main expanse in eye-watering detail. Once she’d orientated herself, Livia skimmed over the intricate network of lines, the ragged nail of a trailing finger covering in seconds what it would take hours to accomplish on foot. The servo-skull hovering at her shoulder felt more critic than companion, the eyes of the librarian-majoris watching her progress. She looked to the restricted section. Here the shelves didn’t continue on in their angular runs but were confined to small squares, representing the cages the books there were held within, the contents proscribed.

Her finger began to flick between the reference numbers within each inked box. At last she found the code she sought, fingertip grinding into the parchment. She checked her notes once again, unnecessarily – the Inquisition’s diktat was seared into her mind, the tome they requested identified by a string of characters. The reference on the map matched it exactly.

Livia’s relief was but momentary; finding the location on the map was a minor and uncertain victory, hope lying only in its presumed accuracy. She wasted no time in savouring her fragile triumph, making a hastily sketched copy of the map section in her notebook and running from the cell, the servo-skull matching her pace.

Livia had lost any accurate track of time as she’d worked, but knew that many days had elapsed since she’d left the entrance hall. Still reeling from the arrival of the Inquisition’s request, the archivist-majoris had summoned all the archivists that could be spared and dispatched a team into the depths to locate the tome. They’d not returned. Nor had the two that followed them. Livia had stopped watching their departures then, leaving others to stand in vigil.

The glow from the hall seeped into the corridor, but even forewarned, Livia had to shield her eyes from the profusion of candles crowded upon the Shrine of the Lost. One for every soul consumed by the depths. The Library was burning lives to find what the Inquisition sought. Despite the heat rolling off the shrine, Livia couldn’t help but shudder. She made a swift obeyance before it, the wing-tips of the aquila she made turned tattered by her chewed nails.

A warden made his way towards her across the deserted chamber, dark robes clenched tight about him. Behind him Livia could see the Inquisition’s request displayed upon the gates that barred the entrance to the Library proper. Within the thrice-barred ‘I’ of the heavy seal at the bottom of the scroll, a skull regarded her with a baleful gaze.

‘Archivist-praefectus.’ Barely more than a whisper, in the now-hollow space the warden’s voice reached Livia’s ears clearly. ‘The majoris has gone to prepare. The Inquisition are sending an emissary for the tome. Their acolyte will leave with it, even if it means venturing into the Library to rip it from the shelves.’

Outrage trembled the notebook in Livia’s hand. An outsider in the Library was tantamount to desecration, no matter the authority commanding it. Their rift with the Mechanicus had saved them from the worst abuse from beyond their walls, but the Library had been forever scarred by the last time an inquisitor had stepped amongst the shelves. Clenched upon her notebook, her fingers had drained of colour. She seized upon a thin hope.

‘The others?’

‘There has been no word from within. They are lost. You are the last upon this side of the gate.’

Livia looked again to the shrine, eyes watering from the number of candles. From where she stood, choice seemed a far-distant thing, the many threads of duty twisting into a lash that compelled her onwards. She looked upwards to the saints and martyrs painted upon the ceiling. Hanging from long-dead chandeliers, stalactites of wax formed reproving fingers. She marched towards the gate.

‘I can retrieve the tome. I know where it is.’ Somewhere within, she tried to find confidence to match her tone.

‘May the God-Emperor guide your steps. He sends His Inquisition, and we have all but failed them.’

At the gate, the warden hefted a satchel bulging with large candles and held them out to Livia. Taking them, she put her notebook inside, unhooked the holder from her belt and lit a candle from the warden’s proffered flame. Thus armed, she stepped into the Library.

The first candelabra stood just beyond the gate, a pale ghost towering out of the darkness. Its ironwork had drowned centuries ago beneath the vast cascades of wax that enveloped it, testament to the countless archivists who had set out from here into the sepulchral depths that lay beyond. Livia pulled a candle from her bag, reversed her stylus and marked her initials at its base. She lit it and scaled the handholds in the wax monolith to secure it atop the mound of its expired kin. It was a flicker in the darkness to guide her way back, the first of many that would mark her trail.

The light revealed only the smallest hint of the stygian space ahead. The maps she had pored over in her office did little to capture the grandeur of the Library. Shelves loomed in front of her in serried, innumerable ranks, here rising only two storeys, ladders scaling them. In the distance on either side the shelves rose higher, spiral staircases accessing balconies which ran their length.

The Library contained books, journals, correspondence, maps, star charts, manifests, reports and manuscripts across all fields. The section on the system’s military history alone was vast, filling shelf after groaning shelf. The great wing to Livia’s right contained duplicates of the Arbites’ annals of law, trial documents and rulings, which were supplemented weekly. To her left, the wing containing the Administratum archives grew by the hour. In places the shelves were utterly lost beneath piles of paperwork that had been stacked up in the aisle, makeshift tunnels burrowing through the teetering accumulations lit by rare and precious lumens.

Livia raised her candle high, expanding the circle of light surrounding her fractionally. Darkness crowded tight at every side, her own shadow thrown wild and shifting against the floor, anchoring the false night of the Library to her heels. She plunged into the stacks, perturbed by the still unfamiliar presence of the servo-skull at her shoulder, past shelves of dark wood with edges rubbed pale by the brushing passage of countless trailing hands. Her course became a weaving zigzag as she made her way deeper into the Library, skirting dead ends and impassable stretches of shelves.

Livia came to a sudden halt. A tumble of unused candles spilled across her path, one crushed flat by the weight of a descending foot. She struggled to imagine why an archivist would not pause to pick up the scattered candles. Even as she knelt to add them to her own supply, she cast about, looking for any clues as to what had happened, but found none.

The servo-skull circled, descending in front of her. Livia looked up with a jerk. Its presence, which she had ceased to notice as she traversed the shelves, was suddenly ominous once more. Empty sockets level with her eyes, it stopped, nibs skittering out from below its severed jaw with a chatter to scratch out a message upon the parchment trailing beneath it. It began to write, the darting of its many nibs manifesting the words from the majoris in ink upon the hanging parchment before they withdrew behind its teeth.

He is here. He is coming. He has breached the gate. Find the tome and our salvation, lest we burn.

The candle she’d picked up fell from Livia’s numb fingers. It tumbled into the darkness as she scrambled to her feet and started to run. She had expected to have days, maybe a week, in which to achieve her task, not a mere handful of hours. Her mouth turned as dry as the parchment that surrounded her, the panic redolent in the majoris’ words welling up inside her. Her fingers trembled as she rushed to light each candle she left as a way marker. The flames danced, and she feared more than once she would snuff them out in her haste. She knew she was leaving a trail for her pursuer to follow, but without them to light it, there would be no way back. The servo-skull and its trailing invective dogged her steps, as inescapable as whatever emissary of the Inquisition now pursued her to the tome.

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WARHAMMER HORROR

A BLACK LIBRARY IMPRINT

First published in Great Britain in 2022.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1, D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

The Stacks © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2022. The Stacks, Warhammer Horror, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80407-182-3

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