Page 64 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Quill search,” Arpix panted.

“What’s that?” Livira was breathing hard now as they climbed a long flight of stone steps.

“A theory.” Arpix shifted his load and heaved more air into his chest. “If the library were really infinite the theory says it would contain every book you could imagine.”

“Maybe.”

“And if that were true... If that were true, then if you know every book is out there somewhere...”

“Yes?” Livira was finding all these pauses increasingly irritating though she doubted her ability to speak a whole sentence right now. Malar seemed annoyingly untroubled by the steps but made no offer to help out with the satchels.

“Well,” Arpix went on, “wouldn’t it be easier to just write the book you’re looking for rather than to go and hunt it down?” He wiped sweat from his pale forehead. “Quill search. You use a quill to find the book you want by putting it on the page. And you tell everyone it’s a library truth because if the library never ends, then it’s in there someplace.”

“The library has to end somewhere!”

Arpix shrugged. “Prove it.”

Livira was struggling for an answer when her foot came down extra hard, missing a step that wasn’t there, and she found they’d reached the top. Malar was sitting close by on a bench in the shade of a wall.

“The laboratory.” He waved to an impressive building constructed as if it were some ancient, many-columned temple emerging from the mountainside. Higher up, fissures on the slopes above belched slightly yellowish smoke that the wind stripped away and carried off towards the northern Dust. The air had a sharpness to it that felt like nothing natural and stung Livira’s eyes, though she couldn’t smell anything in particular.

Livira and Arpix joined Malar in the shade, shrugging off their burdens. Livira, spotting a drinking fountain in an alcove nearby, went to slake her thirst. She drank more than she should and stood, wiping her mouth. She’d never heard of plumbing before she arrived in the city. Now the pipes seemed to be spreading like the roots of some vast plant, reaching into every home. She looked out over the low wall that kept her from a fall into gardens below. The city of Crath lay spread before her. A metropolis of stone and brick and slate and marble, always in the grip of change, as if an invisible fire constantly spread from the library, consuming the old as it demanded a never-ending reconstruction.

Livira wondered how long it had taken the ancients to discover these secrets the first time, not by poring over the pages of learned tomes but uninstructed, through painstaking observation of the universe. She supposed that might depend on quite how many people there were. Perhaps ten billion souls could throw forward a sufficient number of geniuses to unlock the secrets of existence in the same timescale that ten thousand souls might be led through the necessary steps by careful instruction. But the real questions here were Yute’s. How many times had it happened before? And why were they back so close to the start of the journey today?

A polite cough from the smartly dressed old man standing by the door drew Livira from her thoughts. She realised she’d crossed the small plaza from the stair and presented herself at the door. “From the library, I assume?”

Before Livira could affirm the obvious, the door began to open and a dark-haired man in a stained white tunic hurried out, glancing their way, leaving the door still swinging wide. The old doorman stared disapprovingly at the man’s back. “Who have you come to deliver to?”

“Hiago Abdalla.” Livira named one of the three laboratory chiefs who worked under the auspices of the head alchemist. She watched distractedly as the departing man in the stained tunic made a beeline for a richly dressed visitor arriving behind her. He ushered the woman away towards the steps as if she were a stray goat. There seemed to be a sense of suppressed urgency about the man’s actions, and the woman’s offended dignity wasn’t deterring him one iota.

“Something’s wr—” The explosion drowned out Malar’s suspicions, knocking Livira to the ground as a greenish-yellow cloud belched from the open door to engulf them all.

... more popular than the hall of mirrors. The distortions offered by these curved reflectors vary from the comical to the uncanny. Few things have the power to unsettle us as much as a face that is almost, but not quite, right. The lesson of the mirror hall is one of perception. A change of angle, the addition of fresh distortion, or removal of existing distortion, can change entirely our view of someone we thought we knew.

Carnival Entertainments in Southeast Lithgow, by Mitch Kable

CHAPTER 29

Evar

Clovis’s mother practically dragged her daughter off her feet as they fled among the book towers. Her father and two brothers lay dead behind them, part of the slaughter. The sabbers closed their net about the survivors, coming in from all directions, the numbers in their favour even if they hadn’t been the only side to be armed.

Evar gave chase, easily catching up with them as he ran through any obstacle in his way. He soon understood that the mother was aiming for the closest reading room. She still carried the iron-hinged tome with which she’d broken the old warrior’s neck.

As they drew closer to the reading-room entrance, with the screams of the dying fading behind them, the mother slowed and began to limp. Evar saw now that she hadn’t escaped without injury. Blood ran down over her hip from a puncture wound on her left side, high up between the ribs. Clovis hadn’t seen yet, focused as she was on the stacks behind them, watching for any sabber that might be on their trail. It wouldn’t be hard to follow. A line of crimson splatters marked the way.

“You’re bleeding!” The child’s voice held a new kind of horror, something far greater than fear for herself.

“It’s nothing.” Her mother pulled her on, still lugging the heavy book under one arm. Evar understood her reluctance to surrender it. As a shield and as a weapon, it had served her well despite the odds.

The reading room of Clovis’s childhood was much as it was in the adulthood she shared with Evar, a confusion of upturned desks, desk islands, desk walls, the playground of many children. Though if there were any children present when Clovis’s mother stumbled in with Clovis and Evar right behind her then they were well hidden.

A man and woman, both young, were hurrying from the Mechanism, making for the corridor. There was something odd about the man: it was as if his skin were smoking, leaving a trail of shadows tainting the air behind him. Like Clovis’s mother, he was stumbling, and the young woman was pulling him along.

“What’s wrong with him?” Clovis asked.

Her mother drew her aside to make room for the pair to pass. “Hella must have opened the Mechanism to get him out.”

---