Page 22 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

That had been an unprecedented event though. And the mothering, such as it was, had ended along with the lessons a few years ago when she announced that they were all eighteen and old enough to plot their own course.

“You have a new book,” she observed as he reached her. The Assistant at least had a consuming interest in books and, unlike the Soldier, would be expected to note Evar’s acquisition. Her eyes lit with that pulsing glow which normally only came when she stood lost in the search for an answer to some difficult question.

“I do.” Evar held the slim volume up. “What can you tell me about it?” He turned the worn cover towards her. The lack of a title wasn’t important. The Assistant knew everything about every book. Whether she would answer any particular enquiry, though, was another matter. And quite why she offered only silence in response to so many questions was in itself a question that would elicit only more silence from her. “Who wrote it?”

The Assistant’s eyes burned blue, so bright it almost hurt to meet her gaze, and she stood without motion, considering the question for longer than Evar had known her to pause on any previous occasion. At last, she spoke. “The person who finished writing it was very different from the one who started it.”

Evar blinked and looked down at the book in his hand. When they were growing up, instead of knowledge, the Assistant had handed them the keys to knowledge. She taught them the languages that would unlock a million books. Before he vanished, Mayland had accused her to her face of being a mechanical, a made thing, and a broken one at that. The words had brought a different glow to her eyes—but his accusations provoked only a new kind of silence.

Evar tried again: “Who—”

But behind the Assistant the Mechanism shuddered, seizing all their attention.

“What’s going on?” Evar stepped past the Assistant to set his hand to the grey wall at her back. In defiance of its name, the Mechanism showed no complexity, sporting neither levers nor gears nor the cogged wheels that Evar had read were essential for making clocks work. It was instead a monument to simplicity, a block as tall as he could reach, built from grey... grey something. Built from greyness. An odd choice for a device that could generate the whole spectrum of colour into which light could be broken, and more beyond. “It’s never done that before!”

“Not since the day you children returned,” the Assistant corrected. “That was the first time.”

Beneath his fingertips Evar felt a faint trembling.

“Is Starval in there?” Evar went to the door. The door was the only thing about the Mechanism that was subject to change. Some days it appeared as weathered planks on rusted hinges, on others a gleaming circular weight of steel. Yesterday it had been a perfectly round wooden door painted green with a yellow brass knob in the middle. Today it was plasteek, white panels with a small window high up, and, oddly, a button set dead centre above a metal slot that was covered by a flap and perhaps wide enough for Evar to push both his hands through together.

“I’m calling him back now.” The Assistant set ivory fingers to the door, but as she did so it seemed that another reality tried to push its way into the space currently occupied by the one Evar inhabited. Stone pillars interspersed themselves among the scattered desks, rows of them marching across the hall in a gloom all their own, vaulting upwards to support a half-seen spectral roof. Evar caught a whiff of moist decay. Bales and barrels were heaped all around. This, he realised, was the Mechanism’s work—an echo of the world it had created for Starval from the book he’d taken in with him. But the world had escaped the boundaries of the Mechanism...

Even as the word “escape” crossed Evar’s mind he saw a clot of shadow had started to coalesce into a thicker darkness. An Escape! This was how it happened. He’d never been present to see it before. While Evar stood, wrapped in his amazement, the Escape took form, a knife-handed assassin carved from jet, hurling itself at him.

Black blades sought Evar’s flesh, but fast as the thing was, the Soldier was quicker. His white sword sheared through the Escape’s torso and the closest of the knives dissolved into smoke even as Evar tried to block it from reaching his ribs. The second Escape made the mistake of attacking the Soldier. It leapt onto his back. Knives skittered across his shoulders and, as the creature wrapped its legs about his waist for greater leverage, the Soldier drove his sword under his left arm to impale his enemy.

“Two?” Evar had ended up on his backside and was still wrestling with the idea that there had been more than one Escape—there was never more than one—when the third shot past him, aiming for the passage.

“Get Starval out of there!” the Soldier shouted and set off in pursuit of the last Escape, smashing a path through the desks where his prey had vaulted them with barely a touch.

—

Evar stared, dumbfounded, at the trail of wreckage left behind the Soldier. The world that had leaked from the Mechanism was fading, as if the third Escape had carried the last of its strength away. Evar turned back to the grey block and to the white door which the Assistant appeared to be having trouble opening. Evar had watched before and the process was almost instant. She would set her hand to the door, and it would open.

“Starval!” Evar got to his feet. He didn’t know if his brother would hear him. There was a whole world inside the Mechanism. Depending on the nature of the book he’d taken in with him, Starval could be streets away or on a different continent. “Starval!” Evar hurried to the Assistant’s side and wrapped his hands around hers on the door handle. He’d never found a limit to her strength so he didn’t know what help adding his own might offer.

Immediately he started to pull, the Mechanism gave a second even greater shudder, and the door flew open with such force it threw both Evar and the Assistant to the floor.

Starval shot out, carrying a book. His lead foot hammered the ground between Evar’s head and the Assistant’s. Behind him a dark maelstrom rapidly consumed the long road down which he’d been racing. The tall houses lining either side fell to pieces in sequence—the destruction advancing with terrifying speed.

The Assistant was swiftly on her feet, slamming the door shut some small fraction before the storm hit. The impact came like a giant’s fist striking the other side. For a moment the Assistant skidded back, and blackness sprayed from the gap like water under pressure. A heartbeat later she threw her weight at the door again, this time seeming to seal it properly.

Evar slumped with a sigh of relief only for Starval to cry out a warning. Behind them, still forming as the last of the blackness flowed across the stone floor to join it, a nightmarish insect had risen. It loomed above them, as big as the Mechanism itself. By far the largest Escape Evar had ever seen.

The Assistant rose to her feet between Evar and the monstrosity.

“Run,” she said, not looking his way.

The Escape resembled a black wingless hornet, its hulking thorax raised on six barbed and articulated legs to a level where its great head could look down on both brothers. The span of its snipping jaw was wide enough to encompass the Assistant’s whole body. The shearing plates gleamed with ichor that dripped but never hit the ground, smoking away into darkness mid-air.

Evar ran. He threw himself behind the nearest clump of reading desks and began to scramble deeper into the maze on hands and knees. Glancing back through a forest of table legs Evar saw the Assistant lifted in the Escape’s jaws.

“Hey!” Evar hollered at it. “Over here!”

The Assistant had almost never been a loving mother, providing information rather than hugs, lessons in place of comfort. But “almost never” is not “never” and seeing her in peril pulled on a hook set deep in Evar’s heart, a hook he’d never been aware of before, and without hesitation he turned to go back.

A hand gripped his shoulder and hauled him down into cover once more. “Idiot.”

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