“What can we eat?”

The questions multiplied, and despite it being a place where answers were stacked higher than houses... there were no good ones forthcoming.


Time passed. People stopped standing and slumped to the floor, wrapped in their grief and shock, staring at nothing. The children, resilient as weeds, ran back and forth along the aisles, playing tag or hunting through the books, pursued by Master Jost, who twisted ears and whacked the backs of heads in a vain attempt to prevent the unauthorised manhandling of the stock. She was known to despise fiction, but even such a misuse of parchment needed protecting against the sticky-fingered spawn of the city.

Livira took care to ensure all of the children knew to pull out books to record their trail and lead them back.

Librarians discussed the prospects in hushed voices. Yute and Yamala stood stiller than statues, staring not at each other but at the stained floor. Malar brooded, his back to the shelves, swords across his knees.

Soon enough Yamala would gather her strength and summon another assistant. Or Yute would come up with an alternative plan. Knowing that they would not stay long in the labyrinth, Livira resolved to take advantage of the chance offered to her. She seized her moment and slipped away from a gloomy conversation between Meelan, Arpix, and Jella which endlessly circled the same bleak facts, no more able to break free than a drunkard wandering the labyrinth. It hurt her heart to think about their future now. Arpix in particular seemed ill-suited to change, too delicately woven around his duties to pull free without harm.

Livira moved quietly. For years now she’d been following the advice Yute gave her that day she and Arpix came to his door. She’d been writing, setting her thoughts down here in the endless folds of the labyrinth, covering flyleaf after flyleaf with her overspilling imagination, a story jumping from one book to another, the trail hidden by riddles. It had begun as a diary of her experiences in the forbidden chambers and in the Exchange and grown into might-have-beens instead of what-weres. Evar had started to accompany her across the page, sharing her adventures, following the black line of ink as it convoluted its path into letters, then words, then castles in the sky. They’d stridden hand in hand through chapter upon chapter. The kiss they had shared in the empty city had been auditioned here first, more than once, in more than one place. Evar had ridden dragons with her—so in a sense she had already taught him to fly long before the day she truly did.

Livira climbed the shelves without a ladder, nimble as any monkey. She plucked A. E. Canulus’s Great Sailing Ships of History: An Architectural Comparison from the highest row and, supporting herself with nothing but an elbow wedged against the vertical support, she plucked out the already detached dedication page. Page one of her incomplete opus. A map on one side, story on the other. Moments later her feet touched the ground, and she was off in search of the next page.

Yamala might disapprove, but the librarians’ time was finished. Their rules were in tatters now. The cycle had turned again, and Crath City had new masters. For all that King Oanold had preached that the sabbers were animals, dog-soldiers without intelligence or rights of any kind, they had filled chambers of the library with their learning in centuries past and would once again take control from human hands. The place had not been built by humans or for them, at least not solely for them.

Whatever escape the head librarian had in mind, Livira doubted she would ever return to these chambers, and she was damned if she’d leave her book behind as a puzzle for some scholar a thousand years hence. Besides, she wanted to finish it.

Around the very next corner Livira found evidence of the children’s roaming. A thin book pulled from the shelves so roughly that the pages within had separated from the spine and left the plain leather covers lying on the floor a yard or two away like a pair of wings.

On seeing that the book was simply a record of varying salt prices across seventeen provinces for a fifty-year period that ended in a cycle believed to have finished six hundred years previously, Livira opted not to reunite cover with contents. Instead, she pressed her own page one between the worn leather jacket and took it with her. The books she’d chosen for her cuckoo stories had all been of similar size; the pages would fit well between these repurposed covers.

Livira had seen the scale of the disaster outside, and it had floored her. But her world had been torn apart before and, like her namesake, the irrepressible weed, she’d survived, uncoiled beneath a new sun, sunk new roots. She could do it again. The book in her hand—her book—was a statement of faith in the future, not that it would be a good one necessarily, but that she would be there in it. Her fears weren’t for herself but for the people she loved, none of whom, save Malar, seemed tough enough to face what was coming.

She had collected all but two of the well over a hundred sheets when a faint cracking sound caught her attention. Something considerably more distant than the muted cries of traumatised children releasing their stress. Livira hastily completed her stack of pages, sandwiched it between the loose covers, and stashed it in her book satchel.

By the time she returned to the clearing she’d heard five or six more of the distant cracks and another flurry accompanied her arrival. Malar was standing in the aisle by which she returned, at a distance from the crowd, his head cocked to the side, eyes down, listening intently.

“ ’Sticks.” Malar looked up at her. “Could be a mile away. A fight by the chamber door, maybe.”

They went together to join the others. All of them pensive and watchful now, the children quiet and back with their parents. The backs of Livira’s arms prickled with recognition. She’d been here before. On the Dust. She’d been the child. Now she stood in her aunt’s shoes, aware of how fragile everything was, how possible the impossible, anchored to this desperately vulnerable collection of people with her whole heart.

“Is it the Library Guard?” Meelan asked. It struck Livira that her friend was no longer rich. His wealth was on fire even now. He probably no longer had parents or a sister though he wouldn’t have understood this yet. His only family stood around him.

“It could be the Guard,” Arpix said. There were certainly more library guards than the ones Livira had seen dead and the ones with them.

“That’s not the Guard.” John Norris spoke up behind them and hefted his arrow-stick up as they turned. “We use compressed air and a smaller round. Those are projectile weapons, ’sticks, but chemical ones, explosive rounds like the army use. Louder and much more deadly.”

“Could it be more sabbers then?” Livira frowned.

“Someone’s shooting at someone,” Malar said. “We’re not the only ones to have thought of hiding out. Might be soldiers, might be the king himself, fighting a retreat.”

Yute pressed his lips into a flat line. “He should have negotiated.” His voice as close to anger as Livira had ever heard it.

Livira started to climb the nearest shelves without a ladder. She rolled her eyes at Master Jost’s outraged look and wondered how long it would take the woman to understand that the spiderweb of rules in which she’d prowled for so long now hung in shreds. In half a minute Livira was perched on top staring at the distant wall where they’d entered Chamber 2. Something puzzled her. She called down to Mr.Norris in a low voice. “Why don’t the Guard have ’sticks like the soldiers?” Surely the Library Guard would have nothing but the best?

The guardsman peered up at her through his visor. “Apt to throw a lot of sparks about, those things, miss. And iffen you shoot too many balls too quickly the barrel gets hotter than hell.”

Malar summarised succinctly: “Fire hazard.”

As he said the words the first distant coil of smoke rose above the shelves.

There’s no one temperature at which a book spontaneously combusts. Books vary as much in their combustion as they do in their contents. But the truth is that any words set upon a flammable substrate have a limited shelf-life, as do the shelves themselves if they are also vulnerable to fire. Flames are ever hungry and will find a path to their food.

Written in the Stars, by Ekatri Hagsdaughter