Banned Books
These are the books that Singhapura and its institutions have outlawed, or claim do not exist. I have always found an Empire’s fears more instructive than its boasts.
The Kitab al-Azif takes its name from the Samarskand. One might call it an alternate or fanciful history. It describes a world very like ours, save that it is ruled by the beings we call daemons. Singhapura appears in it as a small provincial city forever in revolt against those Powers. The official position is that the book does not exist. There is a copy in Taprobane’s private libraries, for scholars.
The Book of Lost Kingdoms holds that Raavan was no god but one of the first human magicians. The gods, finding his arrogance intolerable, made Umesh, a wild man who became his beloved companion. Together the two slew monsters, built cities and performed the other labours of heroes, until the gods sprang their trap and killed Umesh. Raavan, broken with grief and terrified of death, travelled to the ends of the earth in search of eternal life. On the way he put the study of magic in order and built one of the greatest libraries in the world.
He never found what he sought, but the search taught him to accept mortality, and he spent the rest of his life in the service of his people. The book contains the oldest accurate description of Authority, and most of what it says on that subject still holds. Yet apart from Samarskand, nobody has ever found any of the kingdoms it describes. Gachatan, said to be Raavan’s birthplace, has never been located, nor have the rest. Singhapura bans the book on the grounds that its history is seditious fabrication.
The Annals of the Elder Days is the ancient mythology of the Dvorak elves, and its suppression is the easiest on this list to explain. According to the Annals, the Dvorak elves are dead, and this whole world is a waiting room until they are reborn into the Real World, where they will resume their eternal war against the Outer Dark. I suspect Singhapura finds it insulting to more or less everyone.
I have heard it called the drivel of madmen, and I have heard it praised as the finest fantastic poetry ever written. I mention it because it shares something with the Kitab: a great nameless darkness that will one day enslave the world. The Annals speak of it in terror. The Kitab speaks of it with reverence.
The Dream of the Black Chamber is a long work in many parts, cataloguing the private and social life of an Heir-in-Waiting in Samarskand while rebellions swept its outer provinces. Singhapura’s official histories prefer to treat Samarskand as a golden age and a model of perfection. An ideal state wracked by rebellion and the love poetry of an insecure prince is not what they wish people to read.
Empire in Black and Gold was written by Gaius Hadrianus Larus, a Lusian historian of nine hundred years’ standing; he is Dvorak, and they live a long time. It is said to be the most sustained study from outside of how the Singhapura Empire actually grew, and it is in effect an anti-Singha Chronicle. Where the Chronicle presents the Empire’s expansion as the natural flowering of a rightful order, Larus presents it as ordinary politics and ordinary soldiering, stripped of its justifications and subject to error and to the demands of a restless populace. It is banned in Singhapura.
The Republic was written by the Paragon Sangamitta, who rose through the White Council of the Haugris Church, was a central figure in the history of the Taprobane Imperial University, defected to the Temple of Eighteen, founded the Iron Pagoda, contributed to nearly every branch of modern magical theory, and died in exile. She was one of the most feared and most admired minds of her age, and she never could remain in one place. The Republic is the distillation of her critique of the Taprobane system and the accepted theory of magic.
The Prison Diaries of the Lusian spy Antonio Noronha de Saa were written over thirty years in a Singhapura prison; sympathetic guards smuggled most of the pages out. De Saa writes of Singhapura’s need to dominate, its hunger to expand, and its manner toward everything that surrounds it. Outside Singhapura the work has been enormously influential. Inside it, a good deal of what now passes for respectable political theory was produced by early scholars who drew heavily upon de Saa and never acknowledged him.
De Saa wrote: the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters. I think Your Grace will find a use for that.
Folio XIX · Other Records of Note
Transcribed by Victor Konara