Page 33 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

But the mythology Mayland had liked best was told in the book that he had taken with him into the Mechanism as a child and vanished with. That had been his first disappearance and, so far, the longest. A decade from his perspective, lifetimes from the perspective of his parents and all those others he had left behind. His second—ongoing—disappearance was still a little shy of a year. And, whilst Starval blamed it on an Escape and was confident their brother’s bones would be found in time, Evar often wondered if perhaps Mayland hadn’t returned to the Mechanism and simply disappeared into it again with a new book, leaving his siblings to their own devices for the rest of their lives just as he had once left his true family behind.

Mayland’s favourite mythology was, like so many others, an origin story for existence. It told of the first two people. This original generation was the first to sin against the god who had made them. The first crime to be committed was the pursuit of knowledge. For the first murder one had to wait until the second generation when the couple’s children grew to adulthood and one brother murdered another. The first murderer had a son, Enoch, who founded the first city. And within that city, in the fourth generation, Enoch’s son, Irad, had founded the first library—the athenaeum.

Mayland liked to say that after the original woman’s sin—that of seeking knowledge—it took three generations until her great-grandson cleaned up the mess and formalised the process. Mayland tracked the library myth through a thousand books and found a common thread spun from sources far apart in space and time. So disparate were these sources that Mayland claimed to have found a truth. Namely that the first library echoed itself on many worlds across many aeons, and that whether or not it truly was founded in Enoch’s city by the grandson of the first murderer it certainly grew with an ancient species, taking root at the time of their very earliest records. And in his view the library which had held them captive their whole lives was an echo of the first, the foundational, original library, and he considered it as valid an expression of that primal library as any other.

—

Evar sat facing the border wall that Clovis had had them build around the pool and its crops long ago. Borders, Clovis said, were important. Something to be defended. Something that defined territory, declared ownership. Evar knew from personal experience that Clovis had her own walls and defended them fiercely. Theirs had been a rough courtship, almost a battle at times, the fierceness all hers. He had been allowed through one gate only to be confronted with a second wall, and later a third. And finally, when he thought he might just be close enough to hear her heart and see whatever final castle lay amid so many concentric defences, she had thrown him out without ceremony and shot her arrows from the battlements.

Kerrol, in a rare moment of concern, said she had taken fright and acted to protect herself. Evar, in the midst of his own pain, could only see that she had drawn him close enough for her to see the true content of his soul, and that what she had seen there she had found wanting. Like the chamber doors that his blood had failed to open, Clovis had closed herself to him, and they had retreated to their own islands.

And alone on his own shores, Evar had considered that he deserved everything that had happened. He had pretended to himself that Clovis might have been the one who haunted him—the reason he’d been trying to escape the chamber for so long—that the one who needed his help had been in front of him all along, and it was her. For those months he had given up his search for an exit. But Clovis had seen it in him. Seen that his search wasn’t over. And had rightly tossed him aside. She’d called him soft, and perhaps he was, but he thought that it hadn’t been disdain for his gentleness that had put the walls back between them—more the fear that he might in turn make her soft too.

Evar scanned the book-made ramparts around him. The wall might only be chest-height, no significant deterrent even to the scarce rats and scarcer cats that hunted them among the stacks, but it represented, in Clovis’s mind, a decision made solid: This is our line, cross it and you have passed the point of no return. Cross it and Clovis would have her war.

In his mind’s eye Evar saw the moments when Clovis had driven her knife into the Escape again and again. He’d glimpsed once more the awful anger that ran through her core. She might rage against the Escapes but her true hatred was reserved for the sabbers and over the years an echo of it had infected her brothers. Evar, Starval, and Kerrol had, however, not lost their own families to the sabber raid. That attack had killed the last of their kind and had left them alone on their return, but the brothers’ parents had been killed by time, their deaths as peaceful as nature permitted. The true villain for the brothers had been the Mechanism and Evar had been the only one of the three not to forgive the crime. Only Clovis had lost her people to the sabbers’ blades. Only she had had to watch. Only she ached for their return. And often Evar thought that her strongest yearning was not for the return of her parents or her people but for the sabbers to come back so that she might at last give full voice to her outrage and take from them the blood price for which she had trained her whole life.

At Evar’s back the corn stood silent with no wind to rustle it, and at the centre lay the unrippled eye of the pool. He sighed and turned his thoughts away from his brothers and his sister. On his knees he balanced the book that he had recovered from the tower. It might have rested at the very top, high above him his whole life long, like a bird with its wings pressed to the sky.

The book’s cover now bore an image of a person bound by a thousand threads—defined by those threads. Possibly it was one unbroken line, a single string that could be straightened out leaving no trace of the figure it seemed to reveal. He lifted the cover as he had raised it so many times before and stared at the single, unfinished sentence on the first page.

Evar! Don’t turn the page. I’m in the Exchange. Find me at the bottom

The Exchange? Evar had no idea what that was. Questions had revealed no answers. He resisted yet another sudden urge to turn the page despite the instruction, to rifle through the contents demanding satisfaction. His fingers rested at the bottom of the page, feeling the texture of the paper as if the author’s intent might reveal itself to touch where sight failed. He held the book and let its thrill echo through him—let it echo in the void where his lost years should be, the years the Mechanism had stolen from him. And gradually, as it had been doing with aching slowness since the first day he brought the book back, the void began to take on shape, until the emptiness was no longer a smear in the back of his mind, but an absence confined within a border. And its outline was the outline of a girl, a woman.

Find me at the bottom

The bottom of what? Evar gazed out across the stacks rising in their silent forest beyond the wall. At the bottom of a book tower? Which one? The tallest? At the bottom of the library? If it had lower levels Evar and his siblings had never found them.

Evar looked around. Clovis had gone off to use the Mechanism, ignoring the risk of more Escapes. Her addiction to her own escape from the dusty sameness of their lives outweighed any danger. Kerrol and Starval were out among the book towers, hunting the most recent Escapes. The Assistant stood near the pool, looking across the crops, more still than the plants themselves, her eyes blank. She could stand like that for days, moving only when called upon.

Evar closed his eyes and listened. Some silences stretch, the tension builds and builds again until the suddenness of the inevitable snap. That’s the quiet which lies between people. Other silences fall like a heavy blanket, enduring so long that they become a second skin which can be punctured but never broken. Words are like wounds to such a silence, quickly healed over, quickly forgotten, leaving no scar. The library’s silence was like that. Thick, ancient, the sediment of centuries, settling back swiftly after any disturbance. He opened his eyes and decided that it was time to make some noise.

He stood slowly, closing his book. He approached the ring wall, glanced around once more, and vaulted it in a single fluid motion. Within moments he was among the stacks, advancing with purpose and moving with a stealth that only Starval could better.

—

Evar smelled the char wall before the thinning book towers revealed it. After two centuries the stink of burning still tainted the air. Evar had never seen a flame. The Assistant could generate sufficient heat to boil water around her hands and make edible what otherwise would not be. But for obvious reasons she would not, or perhaps could not, make fire. Evar had read about it though. He’d even seen drawings of great cities ablaze, and in his mind’s eye the ghosts of ancient flames flickered here even now.

In a rare moment of sharing, the Assistant had once told the siblings that there had been char walls before each of the three doors now exposed. That was the source of the black dust that coated the chamber. Their ancestors had dug out those corridors to confirm that the doors there could not be opened. They had never put the same effort into the last corridor since that had been the route by which they had entered the chamber and they knew that without help they would be unable to open the fourth door again. Evar had only exposed a small patch of the door. Now he meant to clear the whole of the base. Find me at the bottom—

Drifts of powdered charcoal swamped the feet of the last few book towers, and by the time Evar reached the char wall itself he was wading in the stuff, the memory of the long-vanished fire even sharper in his nostrils. The shape of the carbonised books persisted in the black wall that stretched twenty yards above his head, filling the corridor. About a hundred yards in, behind an unknown tonnage of roasted books, stood a white door, just as in the other three exits from the chamber.

Evar eyed the mouth of the tunnel that he’d dug into the char long ago.

“Evar Eventari.”

Evar turned to see the Soldier standing behind him. Irritatingly, the Soldier was spotless, not a single particle of soot finding purchase on the enamel smoothness of his skin. The Soldier’s eyes were the same gleaming ivory as the rest of him, without iris or pupil, yet somehow they managed to convey a measure of his disapproval.

“You should not dig here, Evar Eventari. It would be a foolish way to die.”

“How did you even know I’d come out here?” Evar spat black saliva into the black drifts around his calves.

“Protecting you is one of my directives,” the Soldier replied as if that somehow answered the question.

“I need to get out of here.” Evar stalked towards the tunnel mouth.

“Need?” the Soldier asked. “Or want?”

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