Page 38 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“You have to see it for yourself,” Jella said from behind them, puffing to keep up with Arpix’s strides. They had two days to find Algar’s book and Arpix had warned against wasting any of it. All of them were eating as they went, leaving a trail of crumbs. The water-skins that Arpix had filled and handed out hung from their belts and bumped annoyingly against their thighs.

The corridor was not one that Livira had followed before. It turned and turned again with flights of steps on each stretch. Livira’s thigh muscles told her that she was climbing the mountain from the inside.

“Keep up,” Arpix called back at Carlotte, bringing up the rear.

Livira paused to walk beside the girl. Carlotte had been quiet since they woke and Livira now saw the dark circles of a sleepless night around her eyes. The bread in her hand was untouched. “Are you all right?”

“Fine.” Carlotte kept her gaze on the steps ahead of them. Her hair, which was always a wild, wiry mess, now stood in random tufts and clumps that made the normal chaos look like order.

Jella laboured ahead of them, puffing and red. The day before, an older trainee, Marta, had called the three of them the ugly sisters and her table had laughed even though it made no sense. Livira thought that she, Carlotte, and Jella were about as unlike as three girls could get. Later, after class, Jella had said Marta was wrong about Livira and Carlotte but right about her: she was ugly. And her normally smiling face had taken on a closed, tight look. Livira hadn’t known what to say. She seldom thought about people in such terms, though she supposed she had agreed with her settlement that her friend Katrin had a face which made all the boys look twice.

She’d never really given thought to her own appearance, and it seemed that in the city everyone held the opinion that dusters were ugly in general. Meelan had told her that most city folk, when they weren’t calling her people dusters, called them dogfaces and claimed they were cousins to the sabbers. He also told her that most city folk were idiots who should be pushed off the wall. He said that over the Remmis Sea lived a people with skin as dark as old leather and without a single hair on their body from head to toe. Those people, he suggested, would have trouble telling the people from the Dust and from the city apart.

Unexpectedly the sound of their footsteps took on a new hollow tone and within a few dozen more paces the corridor ended, releasing them into a natural cavern large enough to hold all the rooms that Livira had encountered so far. Arpix led across it. The uneven floor had been tamed with steps carved into the rock and wooden bridges to cross ravines. The far wall of the cavern was clearly different to the raw rock on all other sides. It was a uniform grey and so smooth that the directionless light gleamed from it as if it were the surface of still water.

“Why haven’t we seen anyone?” Livira was used to the bustle of activity around the sleeping chambers, refectory hall, classroom, and other departments.

“A visit to the library is an expedition,” Meelan growled.

“You don’t just pop in for a book,” Jella expanded. “So, people spend a lot of time in there. And a lot of time in the work areas when they return. But not much time trekking between here and there.”

Livira frowned. “So why don’t we just live inside the library? Until yesterday I thought we were.”

“Not allowed to bring in food.” Jella spoke around the bread and cheese she’d just crammed into her mouth.

“That’s a silly rule.” Livira took another bite of her apple. “They should just change it.”

“That’s where we’re going.” Carlotte pointed at some distant spot, her face still drawn and tense.

At first Livira couldn’t make out their destination, but there it was, an opening in the wall and, set some way back into it, a white door. The corridor and the door looked tiny in the vast grey expanse of the wall that sealed the far side of the cavern. They grew larger as the children approached, until at last what was tiny became something that dwarfed them. Livira found herself staring up at the mouth of a corridor over twenty yards high. A hundred yards back what she had taken for a door now looked like a white wall sealing the corridor. If it was a door then it was one without handle or window or any feature whatsoever.

A pair of library guards stood watch at the base of the door, looking like toy soldiers. Both wore the traditional owl-eyed helms and carried the weapons Meelan called arrow-sticks. Arpix respectfully handed over the permission form that Master Logaris had given him. The others hurriedly ate the remnants of their breakfast while the guard studied the paper.

“Paper’s in order. Ready to go in?” the guard asked.

“How does your arrow-stick work?” Livira resisted the urge to reach for it. “And where are your spare arrows?”

The man’s eyes widened within the owl eyes of his helm and Livira suppressed a snort of amusement at his sudden similarity to the bird on which the helm was modelled. Her four classmates focused the kind of intense stares on her that said trainees don’t interrogate library guards.

“It fires small lead balls.” The other guard unslung her weapon. “It uses compressed gas. The laboratory knows of explosives that will throw the ball harder, but the ingredients are difficult to come by.”

“We’ll be needing that sort soon enough,” the first guard growled cryptically.

Livira ran her gaze up and down the length of the gleaming barrel, wondering what they might find to shoot so far inside the mountain. “Thank you.” She pushed the remainder of her apple core into her mouth. The others threw the cores away, but Livira could never bring herself to do so even though there were plenty more apples and the core was the least pleasant part.

“Ready?” the other guard repeated.

“We are.” Arpix nodded.

The guard tugged on a pure white glove and set his hand to the door. Livira had expected it to open and that some considerable effort would be required. Instead, the white surface simply melted away. The man gestured them through. “Happy hunting!”

Livira hadn’t known what to expect but she’d thought there would be some kind of preamble, some lead-up to the books. She’d been wrong. The doorway opened into a chamber that dwarfed the cavern they’d taken several minutes to cross. The ceiling vaulted a hundred yards and more above their heads and bookshelves divided the acreage of the floor into a sprawling labyrinth. The floor plan reminded her of both the city outside and of the confusion of worm-tracks in the mud after one of the eight or nine rains that had fallen in her lifetime. It was possible to observe these similarities because the door that had just vanished wasn’t at ground level but rather halfway up the chamber wall at the top of a long, wide flight of steps leading down to the left. And whilst the shelves were extremely tall, none of them reached as high as fifty yards.

“Oh.” Livira stayed rooted to the spot, gazing out towards walls so distant that they became part of the light. She was surprised that the mountain was big enough to hold the room. Just to walk along every aisle would require weeks. There might be five hundred miles of shelving, all of it reaching up far higher than a man.

The scent of the place hit her immediately, infinitely complex. Like most smells, the aroma of books was neither good nor bad. Scent is a peg on which memories are hung. When Livira had opened her first book in the Allocation Hall its odour was simply the way it smelled. And afterwards it might have remained the scent of failure and rejection. But Yute had overwritten those memories and now whenever she breathed in a book it took her back to his narrow house and the crowded little library on the fifth floor, stuffed with curios. It came freighted with salvation—with someone seeing past dirt and ignorance and finding value. Livira took a deep breath. “I never imagined it would be so... big.”

“That’s just the first chamber,” Carlotte said tightly. “There are hundreds of others that we know of. And if we don’t find this damn book in two days Logaris is going to send one of us home and it’s going to be me: I know it. I’m the worst at Tracian and I hardly understand a word of Linear and I—”

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