Page 12 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Evar gathered himself. He was done with running. He raised his blade. “Come on then.”

The Escape tensed to launch itself. Evar moved to attack first, but the creature jolted forward, unexpectedly throwing its scythe-arms wide with a crackling hiss. It spun around, turning away from him. A shard of iron had bedded itself deeply in the creature’s narrow back, cracking the armour plating. Ichor leaked out around the cutting edges.

The Escape swayed, hissing, hunting for its attacker. Clovis came from the side, stepping out from behind a book pillar. The Escape managed to swing for her, but she leaned back, letting the blade pass an inch before her chest, then spun in to drive her knife into the creature’s neck, twice, then twice into its head. Evar stabbed its back, hammering his blade in deep. Ichor spattered across his face—unpleasantly cold—and he lost his weapon as the Escape collapsed.

The Escape hit the ground with the clack of dry bones. Its dissipation began almost immediately, the dark stuff of its interior smoking off Clovis’s blade, leaving the steel bright.

Clovis always fought with dispassion. The hatred only showed once the killing was over. For a long moment, with her lips twisted back to expose both canines, she stared at the fading stain where the Escape had fallen, her naked want on show, her bare hunger for something more to fight. Over the course of five deep breaths, she drew herself back, hiding from Evar’s sight, a book closing its covers, story hidden once more.

Evar picked up his knife, hands still trembling. He’d never seen Clovis scared. Nothing frightened her. Nothing, except that the war for which she’d been training all her life might not happen—the one with the sabbers who had killed her first family. Her unspoken fear had always been that the enemy would not return and that she would grow old here, trapped in a forgotten corner of the library. That she would die ancient and feeble having tested herself against nothing but the occasional Escape.

“What have you found, little brother?” Clovis turned curious eyes on the book tower that had stopped him dead. It was, by some considerable margin, the thickest and tallest he had ever seen.

Clovis picked up her other knife and slid both into their sheaths. The Escape had seemingly gone from her mind as swiftly as its body had evanesced. The weapons and their housing had been fashioned from books, the blades, like Evar’s, from the hinge of some great tome. She had armour made from the same raw material though she’d not worn it on this occasion: a weight of leather covers stitched together and overlaid with metal plates.

Clovis ran a hand across the wall of the colossal book tower. “How has this been here all our lives and not been discovered?”

Evar, still trembling, wiped at his face. The ichor had undoubtedly evaporated by now, but he could still feel it there, cold and penetrating. “What are you doing here?”

“Saving your life.” Grey eyes continued their study of the structure, not so much as flickering his way.

“Right here? Right now?” Evar understood and slumped. “You used me! Both of you used me!” Kerrol had suggested that he stay close to the pool until the Escape had been dealt with, but what Kerrol wanted and what Kerrol said were rarely directly related.

“You’d have made lousy bait if you’d come out here knowing I had your back. Kerrol sent you after me.” Clovis shrugged. “It was a sneaky one. I needed someone to lure it out.”

She meant she’d needed someone scared to lure it out with the scent of their fear. To embolden and distract it. Evar showed his teeth. “You used me!”

“Why didn’t you call for help?” Clovis cocked her head, regarding him with narrow eyes. “I was almost too late.”

Evar’s anger blew itself out. “I was stupid.” The answer was more complex than that, but Evar had little time for his own excuses at the best of times, and stupidity did seem to be the core of it. “Dumb.”

Clovis ignored his statement of the obvious. She shook the red mane of her hair and craned her neck to look up the tower. The tumbling book would have hit her full in the face but for the speed of her reflexes. Several others crashed down in its wake, but she sidestepped them.

“Damn! How hard did you hit this thing?”

“Very.” Evar rubbed his shoulder and stepped back. Some of the towers would topple at a touch. With no weather to bother them they could stand on the edge of collapse for centuries. This one had felt as solid as the chamber wall when he hit it, but sometimes the effects of a blow are not immediate. Clovis had taught him that.

More books fell from on high, and though it might have been a trick of the eye, the whole thirty-yard height of the tower seemed to sway. Evar felt guilty. He’d knocked down dozens of smaller towers in his youth, but suddenly this one felt worth saving.

“Help me!” He threw his weight against the far side, seeking to counteract the lean.

Clovis lent her shoulder to the effort. She lacked a couple of inches on him in height and her limbs, though corded with muscle, were hardly thicker than his, but she always knew how to apply her strength in exactly the right way.

It made no difference. Some things when set in motion by the lightest touch cannot be stopped by a whole army. Somewhere within the tower’s inner architecture something vital had slipped. More books fell. One bounced off Evar’s shoulder. He managed to shout “Run!” before the whole thing came crashing down.

Thunder swallowed them. Confusion followed. Silence—the library’s undertaker—re-established itself in the wake of the collapse.

Evar found himself entombed. He struggled to find which way was up, and then to follow it. He emerged panting and sweaty, and slumped forward, still half-buried in the heap of books. For a moment he wondered if Mayland’s bones lay beneath a heap like this somewhere out among the stacks. Then he remembered his sister.

“Clo!” He crawled free. “Clo! Where are you?”

A groan behind him drew his eye to a heaving patch. A moment later, her hand emerged, and by the time he reached her she had her head and shoulders free. He grabbed her arm and hauled her clear.

They stood together on the uneven surface, heads bowed, breathing hard, his hand still on her shoulder. For a moment it felt almost as if they were back five years ago when for a brief but glorious time Evar had thought they were in love. The fiction that they were truly siblings had been cast aside and for weeks or perhaps months Clovis had been his world. She’d broken his heart, of course. Evar didn’t need Kerrol’s skills to tell him that Clovis couldn’t allow her armour to be breached. Even so, it had hurt. But not so badly that he regretted it. Not even when she took the anger at what she thought was her weakness and turned it on him. Evar couldn’t be sorry for the only moments of tenderness he’d ever known. Not even when she mocked him and took Mayland to her bed.

“Idiot.” Clovis shook his hand off. “You nearly got us both killed.”

Evar’s reply stayed on his tongue. Among the thousands of books mounded around them, one had somehow drawn his eye. He walked towards it, slipping on the shifting surface. A thin, flexible book with a plain brown cover, time-smoothed and free of any markings.

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