Page 70 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Livira now faced the problem that if she slept, Master Ellis might wake before her, and she’d lose him. Fortunately, he’d chosen to sleep near a corner so she could sleep close by and hope that he’d make enough noise when waking to rouse her too.

Livira still had a slight cough from the gas attack and falling asleep proved difficult while all the time struggling to keep quiet. The tickle built relentlessly until she had to crawl away and have a good hack at a safe distance. But no matter how hard she coughed, the tickle would begin to build again. Livira made a mental note to apologize to Neera for every thoughtless remark she’d ever made about how irritating the girl’s cough was. In the end she fell asleep wondering about the lives that Neera, Katrin, and the rest of her friends from the Dust now lived. Malar had delivered her money, not to Benth but to Acmar, who swore to use it for the others. Benth, Malar said, had died in a factory accident the year before. Livira thought of Benth, wise beyond his years, Benth who had carried the little ones from the Dust and who had died without knowing what had happened to her, and a tear fell.

Lacking the softness of a blanket between her and the stone floor and having only a large book on economics for a pillow, Livira slept poorly, waking often to blink in the unwavering library light. Even so, she very nearly missed Master Ellis’s departure. Some ephemeral thread pulled her from the labyrinth of her dreams and had her peer around the corner at the empty space where the man had been.

“No!” Livira scrambled to her feet in the only direction he could have gone, needing to spot him before facing a choice where she’d have to guess. The visceral wave of relief when she caught a glimpse of him just about to turn a distant corner hit hard enough to make her gasp.

Before the second day was out, Livira had crossed several rooms entirely new to her, including one where whole aisles of books had been perversely shelved spines in, showing only the ends of their pages. That had been surprising, but Chamber 72 astonished her. Her first empty chamber. She was forced to wait and hide while Ellis dwindled into the distance, crossing the echoless emptiness.

“Hells and damn...” Livira fought the urge to blatantly trail him out into the open. After so long a chase to just wait while her quarry walked away was infuriating. Worse still, she couldn’t even watch since to do so she had to either be in the room or keep the huge door open, providing a far bigger flag for her presence. She waited what she hoped was a quarter of an hour and risked looking again.

She had thought that he might vanish entirely, swallowed by the mile and more between them, allowing her to give chase under the shroud of mutual invisibility. Annoyingly, she could still register him as a tiny speck even though he was nearly all the way to the opposite door.

Livira accepted the risk and hurried into the chamber. She would watch for his departure, hoping to remain hidden at the base of the wall. She took several deep breaths in search of the centre that Arpix was always talking about. She was pretty sure she didn’t have a centre. She took a long drink from her half-empty water-skin and sat with her back against the wall, stretching out her legs to rest them.

The empty chamber somehow looked smaller than the ones filled with shelves, as if the mind could not truly believe the walls so far away without the thousands of aisles to measure out the distance piece by piece. She could see the opposite door as a tiny white patch, and the mouths of the corridors to the left and right chambers, along with the corridors to the two reading rooms.

On her first trip through the library, she’d missed the existence of reading rooms entirely, but each chamber had two, built into the thickness of the walls. Many came equipped with thousands of desks as if the ancients had expected the library to be thronged with readers rather than scarcely more than a hundred librarians and their trainees. Livira liked that idea. Do away with the reception desk down near the foot of the mountain and just invite the citizens of Crath to come in and help themselves. So what if they wreaked havoc—or at least what the librarians considered havoc—they would scarcely dent the collection and the unfettered learning that went on would be magnificent.

But it was obvious why neither King Oanold nor the head librarian would favour that option. From Livira’s own reading of the histories of lost civilisations, power had a tendency to clump together. Any small concentration of it rapidly drew in more, and it jealously accumulated in any hands that managed to grab a portion. Money did the same and seemed to be, according to Arpix who did not apologize for the pun, another side of the same coin.

Master Ellis crossed the remaining distance with maddening slowness. Livira decided to stay by the wall even though the man would have to be eagle-eyed to spot her with a casual glance at this distance, even out in the open. She reasoned that this chamber might be his safety measure. If he had any sense he would turn at the far door and look for signs of pursuit. Librarians had a reputation for short-sightedness—Arpix, who was somewhat short-sighted himself—said that years of reading soon reeled in your vision, training it to be good at studying the page and poor at everything else. Even so, Livira waited until the opposite door faded from view and rematerialised before beginning her jog across the floor.

It was, she knew, a gamble against long odds. The chances of finding Master Ellis in the next chamber were slim. She had a one-in-three chance of guessing which door he would make for, but even then she would have to beat him there through aisles wholly unknown to her.

—

Livira arrived at the opposite door panting and sweaty, her legs leaden. The door melted beneath her touch. Chamber 97—according to the librarians’ numbering scheme which radiated from the entrance in a half spiral—proved to be another first for Livira, the first time that she had encountered stone shelving. These behemoths, fashioned from red granite, appeared to reach the ceiling itself and braced against each other with stone arches at various heights. Every couple of yards up the book-face, a stone shelf extended a couple of feet further than the others, providing a ledge along which an intrepid adventurer might walk while perusing the selection.

“Pick a door...” Livira chose the left one. She kept close to the wall, not wanting to lose herself in the waiting acres. But since the shelves often came right up to the wall she did need to detour into the interior from time to time.

She’d only been going for a few minutes when she noticed her first ladder. Not a wooden one leaning against the shelves—a ladder that tall would have been far too heavy to move—but stone rungs cut into one of the shelf pillars. Since the aisle she was now following had turned her at right angles to the direction she wanted to pursue, she decided to investigate whether the shelves really did connect with the ceiling. If they didn’t then perhaps she could cross over the top and descend another ladder. Besides, tired as she was, curiosity was offering a strong push in the upwards direction.

About ten feet off the ground, she reached for the next rung and discovered she’d thrust her fingers into a mess of grey webbing. She pulled back with a yell of surprise and disgust but found her hand stuck. Something black and owning an unreasonable number of legs scurried out of the niche at speed. Livira threw herself backwards, trying to break free. The stuff proved incredibly adhesive, and it took most of her weight to tear herself loose. Breaking with an audible snap the strands released her into the arms of a fall that took her to the ground with another scream.

She lay winded for a long moment before managing to focus her vision. The first thing she saw was that half a dozen rat bones and a small skull were hanging from the bits of webbing still fixed to her hand. With a fresh cry of disgust, she tried to shake them off but failed. Backing away from the ladder, and glancing nervously all around for the spider, she slowly pulled the bones free and then got to her feet. The left side of her body felt like one big bruise but her outstretched arm had saved her head from the floor. The library had taught her a fair bit about falling.

Limping slightly and picking off bits of web, she hobbled on in search of a different ladder which she vowed to climb with more caution. Where she pulled the web away it took the top layer of her skin with it, leaving raw red patches. The only piece of luck, which really wasn’t that lucky at all, was that with the head start he got while she crossed the empty chamber, Ellis must have been too far ahead to have heard her scream as she fell.

Livira chose a new ladder almost out of sight of the last one. It turned out that she didn’t need to reach the top—which was good because her arms were soon as tired as her legs. She got about thirty yards off the ground and drew level with the first of several bridging arches. Livira slipped through and found herself on the other side of the shelf, looking down into the next aisle. A ledge allowed her to continue at this elevation until she found either a ladder to take her to another level, or a bridge to cross the aisle. It would have suited a monkey better but with some courage and faith in her sense of balance it offered new freedoms.

Using the ladders, arches, ledges, and bridges, and hoping that Master Ellis was too old or timid to do the same, Livira was able to make swift progress.

And it was from one of these high stone bridges that Livira reacquired her prey. Master Ellis wasn’t aiming for a door. He’d just turned down the corridor into one of the chamber’s reading rooms, a single book in hand. And had Livira passed by a moment later she would have lost him entirely.

Livira swarmed down the nearest ladder and jogged to follow the deputy into the side room, all the while wondering why an old man would cross so very many miles, and pass by dozens of reading rooms, just to read his book in this particular one.

... ginger beer. I say, let’s follow him. He seems a bad sort. By God, I think you’ve solved it, Fanny. He does look suspicious. Come on, Volente. Such a good dog! Yes, you are. I dare say we could all do with a jolly good walk and a bracing...

Six Go On and On, by Enanald Byten

CHAPTER 32

Livira

Abandoning stealth, Livira hurried towards the entrance. The reading rooms were much smaller than the main chambers, measuring about a hundred yards by a hundred yards, with room for perhaps a thousand desks. Peering around the entrance of the corridor leading to the room, Livira could see that, unusually, this one actually had desks, many hundreds of them in ordered rows. It amazed her to find them this far out. But then again, the incredible weight of stone shelving in the chamber behind her was an even greater mystery so far from the entrance. All of it lent credence to the farcical theory that Arpix had once brought to her attention in an old legendarium, namely that once every thousand years, the library chambers shuffled themselves like a pack of cards, or a ballroom full of dancers, each exchanging places with another.

The desks were not the only surprise. The reading room had something she had never seen in one before. At the centre lay what she could best describe as a lump. The grey stuff of the floor rose in a loaf-shaped block, roughly a brick but with rounded edges.

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