Page 150 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Is that supposed to help? It’s just wood?”

“We could wait for it to burn down if you like.” Livira’s good intentions suddenly gave way to sarcasm. “Then you can walk over the pile of ashes!”

Evar took a more pragmatic approach. Quick as thinking, he grabbed Malar’s arm and shoulder, propelling him forward. The soldier vanished through the shelving. “After you.” Evar gestured for Livira to follow the sound of swearing.

The ability to plot a straight line through the chamber made a huge reduction to the distance needing to be walked. It also allowed them to open some space between themselves and the blaze.

Volente led them deeper into the library, chamber by chamber. The smoke thinned for a while. Just before entering Chamber 29, Livira climbed a ladder. Or rather, she flew up the ladder but close enough to it not to further shake Malar’s confidence.

From the shelf tops Livira could see naked flames gouting from the distant entrance to Chamber 17, the shelving deflecting the flames upwards, licking dozens of yards into the air. The glow to the east told her that the shelves around the portal must be ablaze. The books she’d sought for years and that Arpix had stacked in that aisle would be ashes. The thought hurt her heart.

Volente led them through the tunnel to Chamber 29. It seemed that whilst he recognised their ability to follow him through shelves, he either wasn’t able to pass through the library walls or didn’t trust Livira’s ability to trail him blind through such a thickness of stone.

Livira began to wonder where Meelan—if it was Meelan who still had the book—was heading. She prayed to any god that would listen for her friends to be together. She prayed that Meelan or Arpix had found Salamonda and Jella and brought them to safety, or as much safety as could be found. Volente was leading them towards 46, or the Chamber of Ruin as Livira called it. Her friends wouldn’t be there and couldn’t have come this way, for the chamber was forbidden, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t the best route to catch up with them.

With each passing mile the smoke thinned, eventually to nothing, and Livira felt much happier knowing they had, for now, outpaced the fire.

“This should slow it down,” Malar said on seeing the Chamber of Ruin. Dust dunes undulated away from them in all directions, decorated with the remains of tattered pages, loose covers, and scattered books with broken spines. Here and there a damaged shelf still managed to stand upright, or more often just the main supports, leaning at drunken angles.

“Hard to say...” Evar eyed the desolation. If the destruction of so many books upset him Livira could see no sign of it on his face, though she supposed that far more books were being destroyed behind her with every passing hour. “Dust and fire can be an explosive mix, I’ve heard.”

Malar frowned and would perhaps have been happier remaining ignorant of such facts, but the language barrier that had existed in Evar’s chamber had been absent in the Exchange and remained absent here in the past. They were citizens of the future now, and as far as their bodies were concerned, this fire had run its course long ago.

Something caught Evar’s eye. “Over there.” He pointed.

From her childhood before meeting Malar, Livira knew how to judge the dust clouds raised by feet. “More than twenty of them.” The band was headed north, towards Chamber 47.

“Let’s go!” Evar set off with Volente at his heels.

Malar followed, before glancing back at Livira. “Come on! Shouldn’t you be looking happy? These are your boys!”

Livira caught them up. The dust drifts didn’t slow them down, and they raised no trail. As ghosts, it seemed that they could run without tiring or even having to breathe faster. Also as ghosts, they had walked through the door rather than opening it. She shared her fears. “This is a forbidden chamber.” Arpix and the others could neither have ghosted through the door nor removed it by touch.

They closed on the band of travellers a quarter of a mile before the door. Evar led them to the side so they wouldn’t come on the group through the clouds of book dust they’d raised. Volente gave them a still-wider berth, moving through the deepest drifts of books and book dust without disturbing even a mote.

Livira angled in. There were thirty of them, all sabbers. All canith, she corrected herself. These were the canith who had stormed the city, fought King Oanold’s retreating soldiers within the library, and brought fire to the aisles. But they still deserved a better name than just “enemy.” She found it hard to push her hatred down, though. The blood that spattered some of them might belong to librarians. The arrow-sticks they carried might have started the blaze. Certainly, they’d been close to it: even from her current remove, Livira could see that several were blackened, some bore livid burns where the flame had seared away the short hair from their limbs and shrivelled the skin beneath.

Livira moved ahead of the group and stood her ground as they came closer.

“Get back!” Malar, still not confident in the business of being a ghost, tried to pull her away. Even for a unit of cavalry a hundred strong, thirty canith would be an encounter best avoided.

Livira shrugged him off. “They could walk right through us and never know.”

Evar came to join them. “It’s not nice when that happens, so I wouldn’t advise it. And they wouldn’t know what had happened, but they’d know something had happened. I think it’s like cold fingers down your spine. They’d shiver—like someone walked across their grave.” He frowned at the approaching canith and put a hand on Livira’s shoulder. “Come on, let’s find your friends.”

“I need to see,” Livira said quietly. “They might have prisoners. They might have...” She wanted to say trophies. Something that could tell her they’d killed one or more of her friends.

Evar sighed. A complicated noise. Not a happy one. “I understand.”

The canith drew closer. And closer, until Livira could smell the death on them and the chemical stink of their weapons. And then they stopped, just ten yards shy of her. A shorter, older canith growled a warning and raised her staff. Unlike the others she bore no weapon save her stick, which was as thick as her arm and which ended in a twist of polished roots hung with cratalac claws. Her greying mane had been cleverly braided and each braid ended in a ball of brass or lead, the latter perhaps the projectiles fired from Crath’s walls.

Livira froze, staring at the priest before her. Impossibly, she had seen this canith before. Long ago on the Dust this sabber had walked beside a line of children all roped together. Livira’s wrists still bore the scars of that rope. An old anger trembled in her hands. These ones deserved the fire and she couldn’t help hoping that it found them.

She glanced left and right, hunting for the sabber she had first seen from beside the well. The one that had walked into the settlement wrapped in his own arrogance, bringing with him death and violence. He could still be with this priest—one of her warriors. There! In the first rank! The old scar still pulling one eye wider than the other.

“Livira!” A warning shout from Malar.

Livira realised with shock that the priest appeared to be looking directly at her. The canith was staring in that squinting kind of way adopted when trying to figure out if what you’ve seen is real or just some trick of the eye.

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