A stranger in the citade.., p.1
A Stranger in the Citadel, page 1
Praise for A Stranger in the Citadel
“Buckell’s writing always satisfies, and A Stranger in the Citadel brings it: tense, explosive oh-my-god-what-will-they-do-now action; appealing characters you care about, even when you deplore what they do; rich, surprising worldbuilding; a fascinating story of words and the people who guard them.”
—Nalo Hopkinson, author of Falling in Love with Hominids
“With A Stranger In The Citadel, Tobias Buckell writes to the moment we live in, with a clarity and urgency that only fable can provide. Read it.”
—John Scalzi, author of The Kaiju Preservation Society
★ “Buckell’s latest (after The Tangled Lands, 2018, with Paolo Bacigalupi) begins by deceiving readers, presenting a postapocalyptic setting as fantasy, gradually dropping clues to the reader relating to our current world. Protagonist and narrator Lilith, the youngest musketress of Ninetha, privileged with guardianship of the mystical Cornucopia which provides for all of the city’s needs, is equally unaware of her world’s history, largely because books and reading were banned in exchange for the Cornucopias. When a librarian, Ishmael, stumbles into Ninetha as the first visitor in a generation, Lilith’s actions to defend him ripple into the destruction of her home and family by her own mentor, Kira, who was offended by the family’s heresy of secretly owning a single book and hoarding the provisions from the Cornucopia. When Lilith flees Ninetha with Ishmael, she discovers how sheltered her worldview was as he shares tales of his travels and his love of learning. Inspired by Fahrenheit 451, Buckell masterfully crafts this coming-of-age story for a strong, compassionate heroine who needed a bit of reality thrust upon her.”
—Booklist
“Tobias Buckell packs a trilogy’s worth of action and invention into this riotously-paced novel, which builds to a moving conclusion. It’s an exciting and surprising book, a thriller which also happens to be a thoughtful meditation on power, knowledge and loyalty.”
—Alastair Reynolds, author of the Revelation Space series
“A Stranger in the Citadel is a powerful story that explores the strength of the written word and those who fear it. Tobias Buckell has crafted a disturbing and page-turning tale of banned books, outlaw librarians, killer angels, and world-changing secrets—set in a far-flung dystopian future that chillingly resonates with our present.”
—P. Djèlí Clark author of Ring Shout
“The message about the importance of literacy could not be more timely, and Buckell’s sure-handed plotting keep the pages flying. Readers will be hooked.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A Stranger in the Citadel is a smartly-written book, full of deep, layered worldbuilding and complex relationships, all built around a thoughtful exploration of the power of story.”
—Jim C. Hines, author of Libriomancer
Praise for Hurricane Fever
★ “Buckell has written a smart and well-constructed tale that’s filled with excitement and the flavor of the Caribbean isles.”
—Kirkus, starred review
“The scenes of sailing and spying action move quickly, and the climax, set on a supersized satellite-launching cannon, is one white cat shy of a Bond movie.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Hurricane Fever pays homage to (and puts interesting twists on) the classic spy novels of Ian Fleming, Robert Ludlum, and John le Carré.”
—Fantasy Literature
Praise for the Xenowealth novels
“Violent, poetic and compulsively readable.”
—Maclean’s
“Fulfills all the expectations of an ambitious space epic, but also works as a clever allegory about resistance to oppression.”
—Caribbean Beat Magazine
“A writer to shelve there with C. J. Cherryh, Alastair Reynolds, Dan Simmons and those few other writers who have managed to adopt the advantages of mainstream literature without giving up the skilled storytelling and sense of wonder of oldstyle SF.”
—Critical Mass
Also by Tobias Buckell
The Xenowealth Books
Crystal Rain (2006)
Ragamuffin (2007)
Sly Mongoose (2008)
The Apocalypse Dream (2012)
Halo
Halo: The Cold Protocol (2008)
Halo: Envoy (2017)
Novels
Arctic Rising (2012)
Hurricane Fever (2014)
The Trove (2017)
The Tangled Lands (with Paolo Bacigalupi, 2018)
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A Stranger in the Citadel
Copyright © 2023 by Tobias S. Buckell
This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.
Interior, illustrations, and cover design by Elizabeth Story
Author photo copyright © Scott Edelman
Tachyon Publications LLC
1459 18th Street #139
San Francisco, CA 94107
415.285.5615
www.tachyonpublications.com
tachyon@tachyonpublications.com
Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
Editor: Jaymee Goh
Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-398-9
Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-399-6
Printed in the United States by Versa Press, Inc.
First Edition: 2023
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One: The Citadel
The gods say, “You shall not suffer a librarian to live.”
I knew those holy words well, even as far from the center of the world as Ninetha was. But I truly didn’t understand the weight of them until I saw the man in the jagged brown-and-red-patterned cloak brought by his bound hands across the sandy mud under the Afriq Gate’s arches, where the lions carved from the stone glared at the boundary between the wastelands and the city. The seven herders around the stranger yanked at the ropes they usually yoked their goats with as they pulled him into the city.
“Stop that!” I shouted.
The captured man’s hair looked like a ragged bush; clearly, he’d walked the wastelands for far too long. It bobbed in the air as he stumbled, as the herders ignored me and forced him along.
“He’s a traveler!” I yelled. Travelers deserved hospitality. They deserved to be treated like treasured family members. So few of them ever came over the far horizon of sand that stretched all around Ninetha. We didn’t want them to return to their own lands with stories about Ninetha’s barbarity.
As one of the daughters of the Lord Musketeer of Ninetha, I had to make sure our actions represented the honor of our city, and my father. My duty here was plain.
“Leave him be!”
“This is no traveler,” one of the herdsmen spat.
The stranger pulled back against them and tried to stand. Some of the herders yanked back on the two ropes around his neck to choke him, until his eyes streamed with tears. Another jumped in between the ropes and hit the man in the chest with a heavy wooden crook. I heard the thud from a full street’s width away as I walked toward the small crowd.
“I said, stop that!” I imitated my father’s cold, hard voice. I tried to act as if the fact that my order would be followed was a foregone conclusion, just as he would.
But the small mob didn’t respond.
“She said, stop it,” said Kira, who was standing to my right. She stepped forward and swept her hands free of her bright-green robes to point at the other two bodyguards following me.
The herders paused to look over at us with a bit more attention, and their faces twisted with fear as they recognized Kira.
“Guardian, we found him out by the eastern grazes,” one of the herders said, raising his arms and backing away from the beaten captive.
Another herdsman dropped to his knees in front of me and held a bundle of fabric up to us. “He tried to capture one of our goats. He carried this with him.”
Kira sliced the twine wrapped around the bundle with one of her long daggers, then slid the dagger softly back into its leather sheath.
“It’s—” one of the herders started.
“A book,” Kira said, loathing clear in her voice.
She dropped it to the ground, as if it had burned her hands. We all stepped back away from the paper that flapped in the wind as the pages rustled about. I stared at the book. It felt so wrong to be in the middle of
“Burn it,” Kira ordered one of the guardians.
“No!” The bound man lurched forward, dragging herders with him as he struggled to grab the book. Kira kicked him, a leather boot to the side of his desert-scoured face, and knocked him clean out.
One of the guardians knelt beside the book and snapped a flint until sparks showered the pages. The thin, symbol-marked paper flared up into flames in the middle of the street, and black smoke curled up into the air around us all.
Everyone moved back away from it, scared to breathe the ink-stained smoke.
Kira looked relieved. “Stay here. Keep it burning until you see only ashes on the street,” she ordered the guardian with the flint.
“But Commander Kira.” The guardian stood up from the burning book and looked at me. “Two guardians must remain with her at all times.”
“I’ll be the second,” Kira said. “It is my decision. I am the Lady of the Watch.”
Kira commanded the One Hundred Guardians, but every single one of them knew who ruled Ninetha. And my father had ordered that two guardians walk with me. Always.
I watched conflict struggle across the guardian’s face, until she surrendered to Kira’s will. “Yes, Commander.”
“I can spare a guardian,” I whispered to her.
“No. Your father is right. There are desperate people here. Hungry, starving folk who would see you as an easy meal.”
“One day, I’ll ask my father whether it’s he or you who truly rules Ninetha,” I said from the corner of my mouth.
Kira paused. She bit her lip for a second, and then leaned close to me. “That is not a joke, Lilith. Never repeat it around the guardians, and never, for my sake, please, ever say it around your father.”
I looked at Kira’s normally pleasant, angular face and cheeks. And in her dark eyes, just a shade lighter than the brown skin on her arms, I saw no humor or patience. Instead, she looked scared, and maybe a little haunted.
I had thought of her as steady, unshakeable, and a ruler of the world—like my father.
In fact, I thought of Kira as a mother.
But this was all a small reminder for me of how Ninetha really worked. Kira had pledged her life, her authority, and her all to my father.
“Well, you are more a ruler than I am,” I said to her. “Those herders didn’t stop beating that man when I said to.”
“You’ll learn to hold your authority in your voice yet,” Kira promised me. She cupped my chin with her hand and kissed my forehead. The glazed, clay beads woven through her tightly curled hair clacked as she came so close, and the smell of sweat, sand, and oil filled the air between us. “Besides, the man they captured is a bookist, a librarian, a profaner of the commandments. They were right not to listen to you. There are higher laws than just our city’s. There are the godly laws, and every one of us is bound to follow those no matter where we live, or who we are. And that law says we must put him to death.”
“Of course,” I agreed, and wondered if Kira, who had carried me on her side before I could walk, could hear the lie in my tremor of a voice.
It just didn’t feel right to harm a defenseless man. I loved Kira, like the sun and the moon, but the way she so easily talked about killing another person blew a confusing flurry of feelings through me—worry, fear, and a small stab of revulsion that then made me feel shame, as Kira was one of the most trusted people in the citadel, and she was my teacher. Who was I to doubt her?
Kira gently grabbed my shoulder. “You are a good person, Lilith. But you have to let go of your feelings about this. Society requires us to punish criminals. You can’t let your dog root around in the trash barrel, or soon your house will be that barrel. I know this won’t be easy, but it is important.”
She’d said the same thing before a flogging once. She’d made me watch the woman’s bare back bleed as the price for her thievery.
“We will strangle him right here, on the street. The herders can take the body back out into the wastes,” Kira announced as she stepped away from me.
I didn’t have Kira’s presence. I could not make pronouncements, or calmly tell people what they were going to do in such a way that they felt compelled to do it. But I had some skills in turning people to my will. My mind raced furiously to find a way out.
“Kira, you’re right. The stranger is perhaps a librarian, certainly a book lover. There is a higher justice he has to face. Death. But this is Ninetha, not the wastelands out beyond the Five Gates. And the one who decides how a man dies should be my father. Not us.”
Kira stopped in place, then turned back to me. She spread her arms, acknowledging the point. But I could see her jaw clench for a second. “You are correct, Musketress.”
She always used my formal title when I annoyed her, but she couldn’t disagree out loud with what I’d said.
“We’ll take him into the citadel,” I said. “And let the Musketeer of Ninetha himself judge the stranger’s death. That is the right thing.”
I tried to keep the nervousness from my voice. As a child, when I challenged Kira, she would pay me back by throwing me into the dust when we trained later. The bruises would turn a slow purple over the next days, a reminder to me of the cost I paid for my obstinance.
Kira would find other ways to torment me as well. Night duty on the walls, cleaning details. Always an unexpected consequence when I angered her that I couldn’t really complain about to my father. I knew Kira wouldn’t let this go easily.
But what a shame it would be if the man died before he told us where he came from and what he was doing crossing the wastelands, when it had been almost a full generation since Ninetha had seen a visitor. And why he was risking holy wrath by protecting a book.
I couldn’t help my curiosity, as always.
Kira finally nodded. She was bound to my father, and Kira, more than anyone else, respected the rules. The godly rules and the hierarchy of Ninetha. “That is the right thing. Of course, Musketress. You all! Pull him to his feet and bring him with us.”
I let out a deep breath.
Kira shoved past me and muttered, “All you’re doing is delaying the inevitable. You’re making it much harder on yourself.”
She was right. I stood against the will of the gods by trying to delay the stranger’s death. A dangerous thing to do. But surely the gods could look into my heart and see that I didn’t want blood on my hands. If I stood by and watched a man be killed, what was I?
But there was something else.
I knew something that Kira did not.
There was a room deep in the citadel, hidden from even Kira. Every moment of the day, my twelve siblings—the only people of Ninetha other than my father who were allowed to be called musketeers and musketresses—guarded that room. I knew about it from following them to see where they disappeared to when they left our rooms with their muskets at the ready. I’d just been curious.
Hidden away in a nook in a tunnel dug out of the hard rock that Ninetha sat on, I’d peered through the open door of the room they guarded as one of my brothers looked inside to make sure everything was in order.
There, chained behind a heavy metal door and sealed with a lock the size of my fist, my father had hidden a book.
Dust whirled through the Hawk’s Gate and over the city walls, down into the five common streets. It choked us and left the back of my throat bitter with dirt, even when I pulled my dayscarf up over my mouth.
The main boulevards that led past the bountiful houses—the large multistory buildings between the common areas and the citadel’s walls—had calm, clean air. The hard stone under my sandals didn’t leave much for the wind to grasp and fling our way, and there were few, if any, cook fires in this part of Ninetha.
