Page 158 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“How do we do that?” Malar’s turn to frown. He looked at his swords as if he might cut a way in.

“I don’t know. We’re just going to have to try. Putting yourself in the same space should do most of it. Just remember there’ll be Escapes still in there. Maybe one, maybe more. Enough to keep the assistants immobilised.” The footfalls grew louder, almost on them. “Take control. Fight. Bring the body back to the others at the centre circle.” She turned to Malar. “You can do this. You’re a warrior. You know how to fight.”

“What am I?” Evar demanded, outraged. “I can fight.”

“They’re our friends. Not yours.” And I don’t want you to die, she would have said if it wouldn’t have strengthened his objections. The warmth of his arms still wrapped her and whatever happened she wanted him to survive. She wanted him to escape his chamber through the door she’d opened, or go with Yute, anywhere so long as he was free to leave, and to live the life he’d been denied so long. “Besides”—she forced a smile—“you’re too big to fit.”

Evar opened his mouth to argue but in that moment the male assistant with the cut face broke from the smoke, took ten more heavy steps, and fell to his hands and knees.

“Wait.” Livira held Malar’s shoulder.

The Escape, surely the one that had pursued her from the Exchange and then hunted her through Chamber 7, slithered from the assistant, an inky serpent drawing darkness from the assistant’s wound, coiling down beneath his face, then weaving its path swiftly towards the advancing smoke.

“Now.” Livira released the soldier. “Expect to win. Use your anger.” She didn’t know if it was the right advice, but it felt right. Without his swords, Malar’s anger would be his sharpest weapon. It was probably his sharpest weapon even when he was holding them.

“I win. It’s what I fucking do.” Malar surged forward.

Livira accelerated past him, arrowing after the Escape.

Visibility within the cloud was next to zero, even with the library’s light illuminating it from within. Livira sensed rather than saw the Escape as she overtook it. She might have missed the fallen assistant but for the guiding walls of books to either side, and the fact that as she ran into it the corruption within the assistant immediately tried to kill her.

The first thing Livira understood as the Escape within the assistant sank its talons into her was that this was a fight she needed to win before the other returned. Two would be too many. One was already too many.

The second realisation was that this business of black and white signified only division. The Escapes and the assistants were both creations of singular purpose, set to opposite tasks, but one side wasn’t good and the other evil. The Escape trying to overwhelm her had been brought into being in order to oppose the library, just as the assistants had been made to preserve it. In fact, both were made from the stuff of the library, the assistants from its body, the Escapes from its blood. Tools turned to different ends. The two represented differing extremes of an argument in which two parties, each believing itself correct, sought to plot a path for intelligence to circumvent its self-destructive nature. And as a consequence, in perhaps the primal irony, intelligence fought intelligence.

Within the body of the assistant, with ghost battling Escape for rights to such prime territory, there were no punches thrown, no teeth seeking flesh. The talons that had been sunk into Livira were merely the connection between her and her opponent. The Escape sought to gut her. It drew out her memories, sucking the meaning from them, trying to wear her like an old coat. Livira felt herself fraying, the fabric of her being unwinding. She was smoke dissipating across the face of the water, ashes on the wind. Without malice or care the Escape plucked one precious moment after another from her. With invisible claws it hollowed her, cored her, picking away until even the letters of her name began to come loose like the teeth of some old skull abandoned out on the Dust, finally drawn from their sockets by the patience of the rattling wind.

The Escape took everything, leaving nothing but a husk. And, in the empty darkness of that husk, Livira, who had throughout her life been defined by the steel trap of her memory, opened her eyes and took it all back. “I don’t forget.”

The swiftness of Livira’s reclamation turned the Escape inside out and its remnants drifted from the assistant’s head wound to join the smoke.

“No.” Livira slapped an ivory hand down on the second Escape as it reached the assistant’s body. This Escape, the one she had outpaced on her way here, proved easier to battle given that she was now in charge of the assistant and the Escape was stuck outside. She wrung the phantom between both hands as she stood the assistant up. The Escape fell apart and she tossed its shreds behind her.

She leaned down to seize the discarded sword, then ran. She found that Evar was running beside her, having followed her and having perhaps delayed the second Escape to buy her time. They broke free of the smoke before finding the other assistant. The old ivory of its skin told them immediately who had won the fight within it. Livira and Malar were still pollutants within the assistants and neither body was its proper gleaming white, but both were closer to what they should be than the grey that showed an Escape lay within.

“It ran away,” Malar grunted as they reached them. “Tried to mess with my head—I think what it found scared it. My nightmares are a hundred times worse than that horror, and that’s on a good night.”

“Keep up,” Livira said as she passed him. She handed him the sword, white now. “There’s still the bleeding to do.”

—

Entering the centre circle, Livira broke into an atmosphere of terror that hadn’t been there when she left. Arpix and the others had discovered what Evar found when he flew above them. They knew that the fire had them trapped. Meelan was locked into an argument with one of the near-hysterical bookbinders, their voices so loud that nobody heard Livira’s approach. All their attention was either on Meelan’s attempts to stop the hefty red-faced man leading his colleagues towards the least smoky exit, or on the black wall looming high above them from the east, the one rolling up behind Livira.

“Oh, thank Croma!” Arpix was the first to notice her standing at the mouth of one of the thirty or so aisles that terminated at the circle’s perimeter. Normally if he appealed to the gods, it was a generic net cast across as many of the heavenly host as might listen. The imminent prospect of choking or burning to death appeared to have focused him on one in particular: Croma, a favourite among librarians, goddess of learning and wisdom in the Fatra pantheon.

Livira strode forward. She knew something was wrong with her. She’d known it ever since she ejected the Escape and took possession of the assistant. She felt distant, wrapped in blankets that somehow insulated her from emotion. The excitement that should have filled her like the crackle of a lightning bolt merely prickled. The compassion that Jella’s tears or Meelan’s misplaced anger should have evoked still stirred her but didn’t shake her as it should. The spreading relief on the ten faces before her was simply scenery.

Malar arrived and followed her into the circle. Evar ghosted after them.

Arpix was talking, Master Jost demanding, the large bookbinder pleading. It slid off her: discordant noise. She turned to face Malar, anchored by her purpose. She wanted to open a portal, to send her friends to safety. An assistant should be able to do that at will, but whilst she retained more control of her host than the Escapes had, such powers did not appear to be hers to command. She held her hand out. “Cut me.” She had to struggle to say the words and struggle to hold her arm out. Only assistants were permitted to visit the Exchange. She knew that. What she was doing was forbidden. And after a life spent breaking rules with reckless abandon, suddenly she was finding it hard to do.

Malar raised his sword so that it pointed towards her.

“Quickly.” Livira raised her palm towards the sword’s point. She would have been scared if it were her own hand. Even in a different body she wanted to snatch her hand back. She could feel the floor through her feet—she would feel his blade cutting the skin she didn’t own.

“It... it’s... forbidden.” Malar shook his head as if he didn’t understand, or rather he shook the head of the assistant he’d possessed.

Livira wanted to argue, but she couldn’t. It was forbidden. Access to the Exchange for any creature still locked into time could have unforeseen consequences. Disastrous ones. Livira had taken possession of the assistant but, unlike the Escapes, her kind lived in time’s flow, carried along by it relentlessly from cradle to grave. Putting herself inside the assistant had set her apart. It had started to sever the bonds that attached her to passing days. She might have taken possession of the assistant, but in another very real sense, it had taken possession of her.

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