Page 24 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

It wasn’t until she drew near that Evar saw the damage. Part of her shoulder was gone, fractured away along one of the grey seams that ran through her. Not a large chunk but noticeable to eyes that had watched her for most of twenty years. A rough-edged wound showing only more of the same flesh beneath. To Evar it felt disproportionate, like a chip from a tooth, the damage magnified by the tongue’s exploration and ability to lie. The Assistant was part of their foundation. And she had cracked. He had let it happen.

“Come back with me.” She turned and walked away.

The brothers shared a look. Evar wondered if his was as unreadable as Starval’s or if the lost feeling welling up inside him were written there as plainly as he felt it was.

Starval frowned and looked away. He hunched as though cold, scratching at his arms. “Come on.” He moved away from the Mechanism and followed the Assistant.

Evar shivered, glanced back at the Mechanism, then followed too. He felt something else, something not related to the Assistant’s sudden hints at mortality. Evar shivered and knew that Starval had felt it as well. The force that had sucked the armour off the Escape—it had also pulled at the brothers. Not with the same fierce insistence, but it had been there, and a ghost of it was still there, maybe it had always been there, only understood now after all these years. The Mechanism wanted them back as well. After all, Evar and his siblings had escaped it too.

... sorting hat! But even the most sober of systems must admit the possibility that the judgements levelled against the young, no matter how exhaustive the testing on which they might be based, must allow some “wiggle room.” On the forest floor certain blooms unfurl long after snowdrops and crocuses have tested the icy crust...

Career Advice for Mid-Ranking Civil Servants, by R. I. Perrin

CHAPTER 10

Livira

As Yute led Livira out of the shadow of the Allocation Hall’s portico, he raised his cane and slid his other hand inside the cloth cover. Miraculously an array of spokes spread out, stretching the fabric between them into a circle that cast him into shadow once more.

“It’s a parasol,” he said, seeing Livira’s amazement. “The sun is unkind to skin as pale as mine. Ironic that a world as ancient and used up as ours basks in the fierce regard of such a youthful star.” He led on, across the plaza.

Livira could barely understand half the man’s words, and it was nothing to do with his accent this time. She opted for silence and followed in his wake, wondering what kind of job he might have for her at the library and what a library was. Like Malar, Yute didn’t check to see if she was with him. It was as if, without even meeting, the two men had exchanged the set of invisible chains by which she was bound, links forged from the certainty that alone she would be more lost on the crowded streets of the city than she ever could be in the featureless wastes of the Dust.

“Your parents were killed by sabbers.” It didn’t sound like a question.

“No.” The Dust had killed them. That’s what Aunt Teela had said. And though it had been a storm that took her mother and a septic cut that had taken her father, Livira was minded to agree. These were among the many weapons that the Dust wielded against flesh.

“No? But you came in from the Dust in the care of a soldier.” Yute glanced back at her for the first time.

Livira had started to curl her lip at the word “care,” but it was true at least that the soldiers had not left them to die, and Malar had paid out the debt he thought he owed her. “Sabbers killed my aunt and took us from the village.” She had wondered about that. “Why did they want the children?”

Yute frowned and turned away. “I don’t know. They don’t normally treat children any differently to anyone else.”

He led Livira across the vast square, passing the central fountain. She found herself staring at everything and everyone. The variety among the people astonished her.

“That man has hair like Lord Algar. That one too!” She pointed at a fat man with red cheeks, the grey coils of his hair unmoving despite the breeze.

Yute gave an amused snort and pressed down her pointing arm. “Those are wigs. People with an abundance of money and spare time turn to fashion. A librarian’s robes offer an escape from such vices.”

He led on, aiming for the gap between two of the halls fronting the square’s far edge. Behind the largest of these halls the mountain’s gradient, which had been arrested by the plaza, now reasserted itself and, in a hurry to catch up, a flight of steps wound its way back and forth across what was essentially a cliff face that Livira doubted her ability to climb.

Master Yute set a steady pace, though he paused to gather himself at each of the turns where a small level area had been cut into the rock to allow people to pass without danger on the narrow stair. As they gained elevation, he began to look more and more weary, sweat sticking his white hair to his skull. The wind grew stronger and occasionally tried to wrestle the man’s portable shade from his grip, straining the spars supporting the cloth. On the third such occasion Yute gave up and folded his parasol back into its original form.

“Not so far now.” He sighed, looking up at the steps zigzagging across the elevations still to come.

Livira followed. The ache burned in her calves and thighs, but she could have overtaken Yute—the age promised by his white hair was a lie but perhaps some illness had weakened him. By the time they reached the top his breath was laboured, and the parasol was serving as the cane Livira had first taken it for. The fact he didn’t try to hide his weakness made her trust him more. Not much, but more.

“What’s the library?” Livira could only go for so long without asking a question. On the Dust she had learned to answer them for herself, but they had never ceased to bubble from the depths of her mind and sit behind her tongue, building pressure.

“A library is a place where books are kept and made available,” Yute said. “The library, the particular library to which we are ascending, is the greatest of all libraries by a similar margin to that by which this mountain is greater than your nose.”

Livira nodded to herself. Malar had said the city thrived by trading knowledge, and she now knew that knowledge could be trapped in ink. It could be snared in words and locked to the pages of a book such as those she’d been shown in the Allocation Hall.

The stairs brought Yute and Livira to the top of the cliff, and a steep path led them to join a paved road that snaked its way still higher up the mountain’s flanks. Houses crowded the road’s margins wherever there had been space to carve a platform for them, and in other places they clung to the rock face like sweat-bugs, some on alarming arrays of wooden beams, stilts that stepped up the slope and looked too frail to support the teetering edifices they bore. The houses here were far less grand than those around the plaza, but to Livira’s eye they had much more character and variety, seeming as individual as faces, and not just human faces. Yute paused to gather himself outside a house of perhaps five or six storeys, each of which was not much larger in area than Aunt Teela’s house and none of which seemed to be set quite squarely atop the one below. Unlike the dwellings to either side, no two windows in the tower were the same, and at the very top the structure sported an unlikely number of turrets, none of which seemed large enough for a person to enter.

“Yute!” A woman of middling age and considerable girth came from the front door of the tall house and out into the street, skirts swishing as she swept past a man and his slate-laden donkey. “You’ll burn up!” She snatched the parasol from his grasp and opened it above him.

“Ah, yes.” Yute spread a white hand before him, studying it with a frown as if expecting to see tiny flames licking around the fingers. Livira noticed for the first time that the man wore a single piece of jewellery, a silver ring set with a small moonstone of the sort that might very occasionally be found out on the Dust. The tears of god, Ella had called them, scattered across the world in the long ago.

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