Page 71 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Of Master Ellis there was no sign. Livira wove a path through the desks and approached the structure. At one end, on one of the shorter sides, the lump—which was about twice the height of a man—had a door. A very curious door at odds with the rest of it. It looked for all the world like the door to Livira’s bedroom, though where hers bore the number 19, this door had a character from some alphabet or number scheme unknown to her.

If Master Ellis was inside then the safest place to continue her vigil was probably on top of the structure but, having no means of climbing up there, she opted to wait on the far side and listen for the door opening.

Livira set her back to the curious room within a room and waited. It felt worth waiting. This was surely too unusual not to be Ellis’s destination. Time passed, punctuated by occasional very faint vibrations that emerged from the grey wall and passed through her shoulder blades. It felt as if something powerful were at work deep inside, something heavy like the grindstone of a mill, driven by an engine where wheels turned within wheels.

She waited and grew hungry, thirsty, and in need of a visit to the corner of the main chamber. She found herself fascinated with what Ellis might be doing in there. Why would he still be inside? If he had come to collect something he would have taken it and left. They were a good dozen miles from the entrance as the crow flies, if crows could fly through solid rock. What was Ellis doing?

Eventually she had slept.

—

Livira woke, yawning deeply, then jolted into a sitting position. She’d no idea how long she’d slept, but after such a journey it might have been many hours. Perhaps even a whole day. She got to her feet in a stealthy panic, worried that she’d lost her quarry and also worried that she hadn’t lost him and that he might hear her. Cursing noiselessly, she crept to the door end. Nothing had changed except that the door now stood ajar by a hand’s breadth.

Holding a breath trapped in her lungs, Livira advanced on tiptoe, listening with an intensity that made her quiver. The library’s silence refused her, eternal and golden. She came level with the door, ready to spring back at the slightest noise. Nothing.

He’s gone. He must be gone.

But what had woken her? Was he really gone? She retreated to the far end without passing the door and circled round to see if Ellis was visible at the side of the structure facing the corridor, or in the corridor itself. He was not.

She returned to the door and cautiously found an angle where she might catch a glimpse of the interior. She saw nothing but grey. She moved in, took hold of the handle, gritted her teeth, and pulled gently, hoping that while this door held many similarities to her own bedroom door, squeaky hinges were not among them.

The door eased open without scarring the silence. Livira peered inside.

A single grey-walled room took up the whole of the interior. An empty room.

“That’s it?” Livira knew that couldn’t be it. The deputy hadn’t trekked across twelve chambers on multiple occasions to stand for hours in a small bare room. There was a wonder here and she needed to see it.

She studied the door. The lack of a keyhole was encouraging. She didn’t want to be locked in and die of thirst before the next time someone visited. She was also thankful that Master Ellis hadn’t been able to lock the structure up when he left. Though that wasn’t the library’s style. Whilst some doors might be closed to them, there were no keys that put the power into one particular set of hands. Unless you considered the Raven guide a key, which she supposed he was, but a particularly ill-tempered and capricious key with his own agenda.

She looked inside again at the innocuous grey interior. It didn’t feel particularly intimidating, and yet, even so, she was nervous. For some reason the memory of climbing that stone ladder and accidentally sticking her hand into the webbing of a rat-spider returned to her. She shook her head. She hadn’t come all this way not to go in.

Livira took off her left shoe and tossed it into the room. It rolled to a halt and just sat there. She took her right shoe and set it so that the door couldn’t fully close if it had a mind of its own. Barefooted, she stepped in.

Without transition she was in a world of darkness.

It hadn’t merely gone dark. She was in another world, a place where light had never entered. How she knew this she wasn’t sure, but the information was just one tiny part of the deluge. Years ago, Malar had pushed her into a horse trough. This felt similar except that instead of water she’d fallen into knowledge, and it was bleeding through her skin, infecting her with new understanding.

She stood on a battlefield. She knew this without seeing it. Above her head hung a stone sky, miles thick. Scalding rivers crossed the immense cavern, descending from a surface where the sun burned so hot as to melt flesh and ignite anything that could burn. The wars that had raged here in the subterranean depths were the passion, the horror, and the shame of the person whose accounts of the events ran through the back of Livira’s mind in a many-voiced litany. She had but to ask a question and one voice would rise in answer, drowning out the others and taking her to bear witness to events and deeds that would confirm the speaker’s opinion.

Person. Livira had called the speaker a person. But when she tried to see them the impression she got was of something closer to that rat-spider than to someone from the streets of Crath. Her eyes revealed nothing, but the feel of smooth, slim, armoured limbs ran through her fingertips. Here and there a ring of bristles. At one end a bladed hook curving over short, swift, multi-segmented digits. Six limbs.

A primal revulsion shuddered through Livira, something born of shape and expectation rather than based on the creature’s thoughts. Its thoughts were those of a scholar, albeit one shadowed by sadness at the events it considered. It wanted to show her these tragic wars, these heroic battles, the waste, the stupidity, the moments of tactical genius.

“The author!” Livira crouched and felt the warm wet rocks beneath her. “This is my dark book!” The book had been in her pocket when she entered—she’d used it on Jost just the day before. She patted for it now and found nothing. “I’m inside my dark book...”

She turned slowly, still crouched and blind. Livira stiffened as something small but heavy used its many legs to attach itself to her calf. She stifled a shriek and tried to bat the thing away, but it was already under her robe and clung to her with sharp feet. Something cold and wet touched the back of her knee. The author’s thoughts concerning the creature flowed into Livira, drowned beneath her terror. This was worse than the rat-spider. Much worse. A scream erupted from her.

“Help!” Livira couldn’t contain her fear—it sprang from somewhere deep in her guts and wrapped her spine, bypassing her intelligence entirely. “Get me out!” If ever she’d needed a guide in the library this was the time. The image of the Raven—her Raven—filled her mind, blacker than the blindness all around her. “Help me!”

And suddenly she was staggering, sobbing, into the light, blinking against its sting as if she had spent a year in darkness rather than minutes at most. “Oh gods!”

Livira spun about, expecting to see darkness and horror tumbling after her through the door. There was nothing but the empty grey room into which she’d stepped shortly before.

The black book was in her right hand, and she dropped it reflexively as if it might bite her. She’d never understood quite how alien it was. She stood, looking at the black rectangle on the floor for quite a while before she noticed that she was clutching something in her left hand too. A black feather. The one Yute had given her.

“SQWARK.”

The Raven was perched behind her on top of the building, just above the door.

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