Page 43 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Evar

Evar shook the char wall’s soot from the mane of his hair as best he could. He allowed the Soldier to lead him back within the wall of books that formed a perimeter around the pool. The Soldier didn’t physically keep Evar from the char-wall tunnel now that he was grown, but the Soldier’s passion had shocked Evar. The Soldier’s distance and silence had always presented him as closer to a thing than to a person. Today’s revelation deserved respect: Evar owed him that much and had allowed himself to be led away.

“I was charged to keep you all safe, Evar Eventari.” The Soldier stopped halfway between the book wall and the start of the crops that surrounded the pool. “All of you.”

“By who?” Evar couldn’t keep the exasperation from his voice. He already knew there would be no answer to that question.

The Soldier bowed his ivory head.

“Whoever it was never met me. They never met any of us.” Evar waved his arm in the direction his brothers had left hours earlier. “The people you should have guarded are two centuries dead. You couldn’t protect them against time, and they’re dust now. Soil!” He kicked at the earth at the rim of the crop circle. “Your duty is done. Gone. You’ve no authority over us.”

The Soldier remained statue-still and made no response. Fifty yards away, not far from the edge of the pool, the Assistant stood similarly immobile among a curling riot of melon leaves in exactly the place Evar had last seen her.

Evar’s frustrations marched him around the perimeter a dozen times, part of him wanting to vault the wall and join his brothers in their hunt. Clovis would return from the Mechanism soon and some instinct had started to prod him to move on. The siblings had spent so long in each other’s company that they moved through most days in an unacknowledged dance of avoidance, one sliding past another, sidestepping friction. With Clovis the necessary steps were intricate and performed on eggshells, any error running the risk of snagging on her many hooks and pulling loose one of the host of grievances that, even without Kerrol’s skill, Evar could see all sprang from the same deep root.

In the end the pace of his circling diminished, and he meandered towards the pool and the Assistant, carefully plotting a path through the greenery that sustained his family.

The Assistant tilted her head at his approach, a faint blue glow reaching her eyes. “Evar.”

He sat himself at the pool’s edge, legs drawn up, heels resting at the edge of the water which came right to the very lip no matter how much was taken for irrigation. The library’s light didn’t penetrate the depths, and darkness waited beneath his toes. He’d been scared of those blind fathoms as a child. They all had. Even Clovis. The Assistant insisted that they learn to swim in case any of them should ever fall in, but none of them had enjoyed it and at barely more than two yards the diameter of the pool didn’t allow for any of the strokes illustrated in the texts. Treading water was the most that any of them could do and they’d avoided doing even that as soon as the Assistant was convinced that if they fell in, they could get out again.

There was something about being wet that just made Evar want to shake himself dry. Besides, the stuff was always icy cold.

He took the book from inside his jerkin.

“Careful.” The Assistant spoke from behind him. She never liked books to be taken to the pool. As children it had been utterly forbidden, but orders had mellowed to strong advice now that the siblings were older.

Evar, still gnawed at by frustration, held the book out over the water, ashamed of his childish pique even as he did so. What would she do if he dropped it? Jump in after it? She would sink to the bottom like a lump of iron—if there even was a bottom...

Instantly, before the Assistant could move or protest, Evar jerked the book back to his chest. A thought had struck him. It hit home hard enough to leave his head echoing with shock at his own stupidity. Find me at the bottom. The line read: “Find me at the bottom.” Could it be so simple? In the great acreage of library to which he had access, everything was level. Except here.

Doubt followed hard on the heels of certainty. How could he find her at the bottom of the pool? Had she drowned herself? And what good would it do to dredge up her bones from the murk?

“How deep is the pool? What’s at the bottom?” He turned to face the Assistant.

“Those aren’t meaningful questions.” She began to walk away.

“How can they not be meaningful?” Evar got to his feet, glancing between the pool and the Assistant’s retreating back. “How deep is it?” He watched her go.

—

“I really don’t want to do this.” Evar spoke the words to himself. The lightless depths of the pool somehow scared him in ways that the tunnel into the char wall had not. None of them had ever spent much time by the pool, steered away by an instinctive mistrust and by unpleasant memories of enforced immersion. Despite it being the dark eye at the centre of their existence, the literal giver of life for their community, and that of their ancestors down the span of two centuries, it somehow evaded their imagination. Any sense of enquiry had never reached much past the surface, going no deeper than the scoop of a bucket or the limits of kicking feet.

Evar still had nightmares from the times he had jumped in as a child under the Assistant’s direction, the plunge, the bubble-chasing struggle to regain the surface—these things had yanked him from the depths of his dreaming on many occasions. “I really don’t want to do this...”

He jumped in, arms raised, making an arrow of his body, feet pointed towards his destination. The splash, the cold thrill of immersion, the terror of sinking, and then—finding nothing but space with his questing toes—the sudden panicked thrashing towards the sparkling surface a yard or two above his fingertips.

Evar hauled himself out on the edge and lay there with the water streaming from him. He was panting, more from the urgency of his escape than because of air-starved lungs. The whole thing had taken only a fraction of the time he knew he could hold his breath for.

“Hell.” He was glad that his only witness was the Soldier and even he didn’t appear to be paying any attention. He wanted to say that that was the end of it, he had tried, and the idea was a stupid one. At the bottom. How deep did he have to go? He could make a long thread from endless book bindings and lower something in to gauge the depth to the bottom. But in the end, all that mattered was could he reach it or not? With a sigh he got up and went to gather what he needed.

—

Evar returned with a double armful of loose iron. With limited breath in his lungs, he would have to descend as swiftly as possible. He could sink faster than he could swim, but only if he carried sufficient weight. His burden would have to be released to allow him to return, and such a collection of iron could not be discarded lightly. The others would be furious with him. He had gathered up most of the iron book hinges that had been salvaged over the years, along with some mysterious plates and rods and toothed wheels whose origin and purpose remained unknown. Some of these had been part of their heritage, collected by Evar’s ancestors over many lifetimes. Two of the loose metal plates Mayland had found discarded among the stacks. The rods and wheels were not even iron but some other metal that Starval said was probably brass.

Evar stood at the edge of the pool, staring at the sparkling surface. He clutched the angular mass of his burden tightly to his chest, gritting his teeth against the pain of sharp corners digging in. He felt the weight of it in his arms. He would have to descend close to the side to prevent the load tipping and spilling before he wanted to rise.

A sensible plan would be to recruit one of the others. To make two leather ropes and a leather bag so that both he and the precious weight he had gathered could be recovered. That would be the sensible path. But common sense seemed somehow less important than speed. And some selfish part of him wanted this for himself, the definite danger, the likely disappointment, the remote chance of escape.

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