Page 114 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“See what?” Evar stared.

“The colour on my nails?”

“...no.” The admission dragged from unwilling lips as if he didn’t like the taste of it. “Wait.” Evar held up his own hand in denial. “You were inky when I first saw you. And bruised. I didn’t expect either of those things. I didn’t expect to see you at all.”

“So maybe the Exchange shows us a mix of truth and expectation,” Livira said.

“Or just truth!”

“How do I know I’m seeing you? You don’t see my blue nails.” Livira made a fist and willed them back to normal. “I could make my hair reach my ankles. Or grow a third arm. And you wouldn’t see it.”

“Those aren’t the truth.”

Livira ran her fingers across her lips, thoughts churning. Was Evar seeing the real her, and if he wasn’t, would he like what he saw when expectation’s scales were removed from his eyes?

After a long pause she started back down the stairs. “Let’s find some people. I expected to see lots. And that didn’t work.”

—

Evar suggested they try the next great hall along the perimeter of the square.

Livira disagreed. “We should try a house. Houses always have people. It might be some kind of weird holiday where everyone has to stay home, because they’re not in the streets and they’re not in the temples. Not that one at least.”

“Well, they couldn’t have got in, even if they wanted to,” Evar said.

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t see the bar on the inside? Those doors weren’t going to open from outside. I assumed that was why there was nobody there but us ghosts.”

And so, at Livira’s insistence they took to the air and flew over the city’s rooftops, faster than a man can run, and aimed themselves at the clustered housing of low town, down by the great gates to the city.

“There! Do you see it?” Livira had caught a wisp of smoke rising from a chimney and angled herself towards it.

“See what?” Evar chased her.

Rather than answer, Livira landed on the roof beside the terracotta smokestack. “You can smell it now.” She’d meant the smoke, but there was something else too.

Evar sniffed. “The whole city smells down here. Of lots of things. But there’s one thing in particular. A barbed kind of smell. Gets into your nose... You must have caught it too?”

Livira was busy studying the street below. A pool of blood lay across the flagstones, smeared as if the originator of it had hauled themselves away, or been hauled. Two of the front doors she could see hung on their hinges. The houses, like the one they were standing on, were five-storey affairs with many small windows. Lodging houses, she guessed, renting rooms to poor labourers or whole floors to families of rather modest means. Katrin and her husband lived in a similar place, though somewhat smaller and more run-down even than these.

“Blood,” Evar said. “I can smell that too, now. Looks like our efforts to arrive when there wasn’t going to be any fighting didn’t work!”

Livira sniffed but caught nothing save the drifting smoke that had first brought her to the chimney. Evar’s sense of smell seemed far more sensitive than hers. “Let’s go in.” Livira let the sinking feeling that had settled on her carry her down through the roof tiles, through the horsehair mats beneath them, through timbers, boards, and plaster.

“Oh, hells.” Evar dropped beside her, stumbling on the bed.

“I didn’t think I could hate the sabbers any more than I already did.” Livira could smell the sharp chemical stench now, gathered in the room where the wind hadn’t yet fully cleared it. It reminded her strongly of the gas that the rogue alchemist had been paid to kill her with. A sweeter, sickly odour ran beneath it. The smell of corruption, of flesh turning bad.

A woman lay on the bed with her baby beside her, tumbled in the blanket. Her body had contorted, every limb at a painful angle, the tendons visible in her neck, foam in her mouth, eyes bulging from their sockets, their lustre dulled by the alkalines that had eaten her lungs and scorched her skin. A sabber lay face down in the doorway, blood leaking from beneath its head.

“The bastards...” Livira whispered.

Evar looked confused. “I don’t understand what happened here.”

Livira shook her head, trying to refuse the sight, but even as she did so she sank through the floor to see what truth lay below.

On the next storey, four sabbers lay dead in the largest room, huddled together. On the stairwell a young man had broken the railings in his death throes.

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