Page 145 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“I learned something today—”

“What are you saying to him?” Malar interrupted. “He’s the enemy, remember.”

Livira sighed. “I know.” She pictured the bodies scattered along her corridor. One of them would have been hers if she’d been in her rooms. If Yute hadn’t summoned her to his house. “It’s literally what we call them. Sabber.”

“What’s he saying?” Suspicion tinged Evar’s voice. Livira’s skill with the language should have been too basic to detect such nuance but she supposed that her ears had been hearing him speak all the time they’d spent together while the Exchange put his meaning into her mind. It was a level of schooling that Heeth Logaris would die for. If the sabbers hadn’t killed him only half a day ago.

“I learned something today,” Livira repeated. “There are doors in the library I can’t open—no human can—but that will open for any of your people. And there are doors that your kind, the canith, can’t open but that will open for any human. And there are other doors that neither of us can open.”

“Do you think...”

“I don’t know. But it’s worth trying, isn’t it?”

Evar adjusted his course, leading them into a glade where the books were stacked only five or six high in single columns, the tops giving the impression of a gently undulating surface.

Livira turned her head to look at the sword-bearing assistant walking beside her. Unlike the pure assistants she’d seen in great numbers, this one and the one they’d left behind at the pool weren’t the gleaming enamel-white of a new tooth, or the grey or black of an assistant corrupted by Escapes. Instead, the pair were off-white, ivory and cream, almost yellowing in places, shot through here and there with faint grey seams.

The side it presented to her had a buckled, melted texture to it, as if it had been exposed to some great heat. “Assistants don’t carry swords.”

“I do.” The assistant kept its eyes forward, ever watchful.

“Why?” She remembered that she had seen one assistant with a sword. The black one that had escaped from Chamber 7 had made itself a sword to strike down the assistant that Yamala had summoned to guide them.

The assistant ignored her.

Livira remembered that the corrupted assistant had given Yamala’s assistant a wound down across its eyebrow and cheek. A wound that had allowed it too to be corrupted. “Look at me.”

The assistant turned his face to her. The same wound marked it.

Livira stopped walking and took a step back. “Evar. Do you trust this assistant?”

Evar turned. “I do.” He set a hand to the assistant’s shoulder. “You should too. If the Soldier wanted us dead, we’d all be dead. Even Clovis can’t beat him.” Evar looked between them, unsmiling. “Besides, I think he likes you.”

The assistant said nothing, merely returning to watching the lines along which danger might approach.

“Come on.” Evar led off, avoiding Livira’s eyes. “I want to see if you can open the door.”

—

They approached the huge white door along a hundred yards of corridor set into the vast expanse of the chamber wall. There had been two doors in Chamber 97 that Livira could not open. Based on the location of Evar’s Mechanism, this was a different exit. By rights she should be able to open it.

Livira craned her neck, looking up at the door’s height. Behind her, Malar, the assistant, and Evar waited in a row. Livira was glad to have something to focus on. Evar couldn’t hide his disappointment. He seemed hardly able to look at her, lost in his own thoughts. He’d spent his life waiting to find his mystery woman, this marvel who had somehow defined him, given him meaning in a bleak existence. He’d expected some fierce, glorious creature like his sister, but wise and loving and full of poise and wisdom. And got... a skinny duster, not even his own species, despised by most of her own, one full of questions and sharp angles and an inability to settle or do what was expected of her. The white expanse of the door brought her back to the moment.

Livira glanced back at the assistant—the Soldier, Evar called him. “You could have opened this door any time you wanted to. Why didn’t you? Is there something we should know?”

“It’s not my place to open doors. The doors serve as intended.”

“But you can open them?” Livira remembered Yute had said a corrupt assistant couldn’t open doors.

The assistant made no reply.

“Have you been on the other side?”

“Yes.”

“Recently?”

“Define recen—”

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