Page 76 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Let’s go!”

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The instant Livira stepped through she knew she’d made a mistake. The air clawed at her eyes and scalded her throat. It was as bad as the cloud that the alchemists had tried to kill her with. She retreated through the portal immediately and fell onto the grass, choking.

It took a while before her lungs allowed her to speak, and her eyes were still streaming. “Evar?” She couldn’t see him but then she could hardly see the trees through the blur of her tears. She should have been able to hear him coughing though. “Evar!”

Wheezing, she crawled to the portal again. “Evar?”

He hadn’t made it back. He was trapped on the other side, dying. Or dead. Livira had no desire to go back. None whatsoever. Even so she screwed up her courage, dragged a deep breath into her raw lungs, and rushed forward hoping to find him before the poison of that place sealed her eyes. She’d find him and drag him back. She’d—

A large shape heading in the opposite direction collided with her somewhere just inside the portal’s shimmering light. She lost the precious breath she’d stored and found herself carried backwards, thrown once more onto the grass of the Exchange.

“Livira!” Evar loomed over her, dark against the sun. “What’s wrong?”

It took several minutes before she could answer him with anything but coughing.

“Why could you breathe there, and I couldn’t?” Livira wanted to know once she was able to make a whole sentence.

“Maybe ghosts don’t need to breathe,” Evar said. “It smelled... dangerous, but it didn’t hurt me.”

“You were a ghost there too? I didn’t have long enough to find out. But I guess I must have been myself if it did this to me.” She paused to cough and spit, starting to get a bit self-conscious about the drooling, red-eyed mess that she was. “What did you see there?”

“It was the library again. It looked just the same, but the pool was in front of a white door, so I went through. I mean literally through the door. And on the other side was some sort of stone temple built into the side of a mountain. There were... creatures... there, about half my height but wider and hunched over and covered in shaggy yellowish hair. Just mounds of hair really. With legs. And arms.” Evar made a circle with both hands to show arms thicker than Livira’s body. “And a kind of single claw from the back of their hands, like a blade.”

“A different world,” Livira wheezed.

Evar seemed sceptical. “Maybe they have creatures like that somewhere outside the library—just a place you haven’t been.”

“Maybe. But they don’t have different air.”

Evar frowned. “The sky was green. I saw it through the pillars at the front. Not like here at all.”

Livira laughed, which set her coughing for a while. “I—I would have thought—that was a pretty big clue, even for a ghost.”

“Until today I’d never seen a sky,” Evar said. “Now I’ve seen two.”

Livira wiped her eyes again. “So, we changed worlds by changing columns, and you changed times by changing rows... Which tells us...”

“That a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” Evar said. “And as my brother Mayland was fond of saying, that’s a law that scales swiftly. A lot of knowledge is a very dangerous thing. A man who knows how to sharpen a stick can stab his neighbour to death. That’s a little knowledge for you. But Clovis knows about weapons that can level continents and leave nothing save dust. And Mayland knew about wars in which that actually happened.”

Livira, who had lived most of her life amid seemingly endless dust, wondered for the first time quite how that dust came to be there, and if its origins might be more sinister than the drying up of a lake. “What’s your alternative? Ignorance?”

“Ignorance is bliss—that was another of Mayland’s favourite sayings. I think it came from the mythology he liked so much about the foundation of the library. In that creation myth the first woman and first man start in bliss, in a perfect garden, and a single drop of forbidden knowledge spoils everything.”

Livira didn’t like that idea at all but although her instinct was to say so, she decided to bite her tongue rather than criticize Evar’s dead brother. She’d picked up at least a smattering of tact from Arpix and the others over the years, though it still seemed the most difficult of the languages she’d been asked to learn. Instead, she offered a theory. “I think we might be in the same world but at different times. And when you come back in time, you’re a ghost because you can’t be allowed to change what’s already happened. You went through a portal along the column that joins your one to mine, and you were a ghost in your sister’s childhood. We both went through a portal off the column and we were in a different world with different air and different sky. But you were a ghost because it’s in your past. Move along a row to move back or forward in time, change columns to change worlds. We should go through another portal, one that lies between yours and mine, and try to gather more data.

“But my working hypothesis is that every pool off the line joining our pools connects to a different world. Let’s say that line runs south to north. Taking pools off our line, east or west, changes where we are in space. And moving north”—she indicated the line between her pool and Evar’s—“changes time. That direction is my future. South is my past. If any of us goes through a pool that leads to our past then we’ll be a ghost—because if we could be seen or heard there, or touch anything, we could change what has happened, and that would make no sense.” Livira drew a breath. “Your pool connects to a time many years ahead of mine. We live in the same world but at different times. You will live in my future. I lived in your past.”

Even as she said it Livira didn’t really want it to be true. It seemed sad to have found a new friend only to learn that they were separated by such an unforgiving barrier. She might be an old woman in his time. Or have been dead for hundreds of years. If Evar were to visit her time he would be a ghost, invisible and untouchable. A sad smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. She had been happier before the idea occurred to her. “Or perhaps ignorance is bliss.”

“Which should we choose?” Evar looked along the line.

“You could come to mine. But I think you’d be a ghost there too. I wouldn’t be able to see you or even speak to you, just like Clovis couldn’t.” It seemed unfair.

“You could come to mine,” Evar offered. “Maybe we’d both be ‘real’ there...” But even as he spoke, he seemed to regret having said it. He furrowed his brow in a deep frown and Livira felt that he didn’t really want her there. Perhaps he wanted to bring someone better back to his siblings, a grown-up at least even if he couldn’t find this woman he’d been dreaming about.

Livira decided to let him off the hook and pretend he hadn’t made the offer. “Well, if the pools are counting time, like beads on a line, there must be a gap of years between them, each one would be a further step back into the past or into the future. So, choose one that aims at a time you want to visit.”

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