Page 13 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Evar could neither understand nor resist whatever force it was that drew him to the unremarkable book. It almost felt like memory. Perhaps something had been broken free when the Escape tried to invade his mind. He bent to pick it up. A shock ran through him as he touched it. Recognition.

There are moments in life when you know with a great and unshakeable certainty that everything will change. Evar straightened, book in hand. He knew that he had set his foot upon some great new path, though he had no notion of what it might be or what reason he might have for feeling this way. But, blood to bone, he knew it.

“Let’s see.” Clovis had followed him.

“It’s mine. Find your own.” He waved his arm at the heap and at the dozens of lesser towers toppled by the giant’s fall.

Clovis shrugged and turned away. Her rotation flowed into a blur, dropping and sweeping his legs. A moment later Evar hit the pile hard. His vision cleared in time to see Clovis heading away with his prize in her hand.

Evar rolled, rose from all fours, and ran after her, scattering pages. Clovis swayed aside as he charged at her back and somehow left enough of her leg in his path to trip him. He went sprawling into a book drift, rolling back to his feet with a snarl.

“Here.” Clovis tossed the book at him. “Good luck reading it without the Mechanism.”

Evar caught the flutter of pages and covers awkwardly. It hit him as if she’d thrown a reading desk rather than a book, still weighted with that shock of revelation—of recognition. His excitement collapsed, though. If Clovis couldn’t read the language it was written in, then he wouldn’t be able to either. The Assistant had taught them to read well in several languages and had handed over the rudiments of a dozen more, but still, without the Mechanism the great majority of the library’s tomes were closed to their understanding, however easily the covers might be opened.

“Come on.” Clovis walked on at pace.

Evar followed, resenting her tone of command. He’d vanished into the Mechanism long before Clovis had been born. Mayland had been first, then Evar, then Kerrol, Starval, and finally Clovis, the only survivor of the sabber attack that left the five of them as the last of their kind. The four brothers had already been lost within the Mechanism, generations apart and a generation before Clovis had somehow fled into it.

Years later they had been disgorged together, vomited up from the unknown, reborn. None of them had aged and the Assistant—who had been created for duties very different to those of raising children—became mother to them all.

The resentment slid from him as they walked. Evar had never been able to hold on to anger or bitterness for long, perhaps encouraged to let them go by witnessing their corrosive effects on both Clovis and Starval. He turned his attention to the book tingling in his hands.

The book had no title. Its thin leather covers were smooth with touching, its flexible contents loosely bound. The pages seemed oddly matched and sized for some fatter volume, being maybe two handspans wide and three tall. Ahead of him Clovis broke into a jog, news—at least of the kind not discovered between the covers of a book—was a great rarity and although her audience was small, Clovis clearly burned with the need to report it.

On any other day Evar would have raced her to be first with the news. Today curiosity won before the race had started. He slowed and, at the risk of an embarrassing collision with one of the many pillars, he lifted the new book and turned the cover.

He stopped dead in his tracks. Clovis had been right—the Assistant had never taught them this language. She’d never even shown them this alphabet, a flowing fourteen-letter script reminiscent of old Etrusian. The first page was blank save for a single line slanted across the middle, written in haste by a careless hand, seemingly terminated in mid flow. Evar had never seen another example. And yet he understood it perfectly.

Evar! Don’t turn the page. I’m in the Exchange. Find me at the bottom

It seems clear that, like archetypes in works of fiction, certain cities spring up wherever the conditions allow—though from what spores, I cannot say. The origins of the name remain unknown, lost amid dozens of theories. Like children’s names, falling in and out of common use, the names of great cities can recur after long periods of dormancy and be passed from ruin to building site in quick succession, creating dynasties in stone to rival any royal house.

A History of Crath City, by Kerra Brews

CHAPTER 6

Livira

Livira had been dirty her whole life, but she had never felt dirty until she stepped through the vast gates of the city. She had been dwarfed by the great expanse of the Dust but never felt small until the sandstone walls of Crath rose above her.

The sabbers, and then Malar and his comrades, had been the first strangers she’d ever met. She was still getting used to that idea when the city crowds closed around them, allowing no space even for Henton’s pungent corpse. A babble of voices, the shouts of wagoneers, men and women crying out seemingly just for the hell of it. Booted feet, sharp elbows, incurious eyes, a seething mass of people hardly touched by the dust, their clothes unpatched, untorn, and sporting colours other than that of the dirt from which Livira and her fellow settlers had been born. Here and there some wore the smocks and shifts and jerkins that you’d see at the settlement, only cleaner and more colourful. But the majority wore a bewildering variety of garments, many of which Livira had no name for. Coats of many designs, some sweeping to the back of the knee, waistcoats, dresses that billowed out as if the women beneath them had hips a yard across, jackets with silver buttons, hats of a hundred designs... Some of the most richly dressed men and women even had hair unlike anything she’d seen, hanging in unnatural curls and such a uniform shade of grey that it might have been painted.

Malar started to haul the smaller children off the horses and set them on the ground where they clung to each other and to the bigger ones—an almost singular knot of dirty rags amid the bustling crowds.

“Godsake!” Malar deposited Breta, the smallest of them, on the cobbles. She stood with her fear trembling through every limb, unable to walk. “Stop with the snivelling.” He pointed to the gates still visible behind them. “No sabber ever got through those gates ’less it was wearing chains. We made it. You’re safe.”

Malar led off, forging a path through the press of people. Livira stuck to the soldiers’ heels, sandwiched between their horses.

“How long before they do?” muttered Jons, now dismounted.

“Do what?” Malar didn’t look at him.

“Come through those gates.” Jons said it so quietly that Livira almost didn’t hear him over the clatter of hooves and voice of the crowd.

“Ten years?” Malar shrugged and spat. “Tops.”

An old woman in black elbowed past Livira in the throng, spitting at her as she went. No anger in it, the casual hostility the more shocking for that fact. Livira wiped the saliva from her shift. She’d have spat back if she’d been less surprised and less dry.

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