Page 79 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

The assistant continued to stack books.

Evar snorted. “Impediment! That’s what Livira called you. Good name too.” He tried not to think about what had happened to her. “At least tell me the way out. Outside, I mean.”

The assistant paused in her work, as if considering, and then, without looking up, extended her arm and one porcelain finger, pointing almost but not quite at the furthest corner.

“Thank you.” Evar watched the assistant stack a few more books. There seemed to be no more organisation taking place than in the stacks Evar had lived among all his life. “You’re really not going to talk to me, are you?”

After an embarrassingly long pause, Evar set off in the direction indicated, winding a path around the book stacks, letting instinct guide him, rather than passing through them. Part of him worried that if he maintained contact with any particular book too long it might start to change him just as they changed the Escapes. The idea that he might share that in common with the monsters who had attacked him and who had probably killed Livira was not one he wanted to allow space in his head.

As he left the book stacks and headed out onto open floor, Evar looked back and realised that the stacked area, though only a couple of hundred yards wide, was the best part of a mile long.

“She’s moving the pool.” It was the most obvious explanation for it. As the assistant worked, she was moving the pool—the portal as Livira saw it. In fact, Livira’s version made more sense. The pool only made sense if there had been a need for water. Like for irrigating crops to keep hundreds of people eating properly rather than hanging on in the semi-life of the centre circle. After too long depending on the circle for sustenance it felt more like you were being refused permission to die than that you were being given life.

Evar walked on, although he supposed that moving his legs might not be required, given that he was a ghost. When he finally got to the wall he reached into it, tentatively at first, fearing some kind of reaction. It felt like nothing. With a degree of unease, he edged into it until at last he was close enough to dip his face in. The space beyond was black. It scared him. He’d lived his entire life in the light. Even when sleeping he simply needed to open his eyes to see.

If he walked forward, he’d be blind and unsure of what he was even walking on. It seemed likely that the outside world, or at least another chamber, lay not too far in the direction the assistant had sent him. But what if it didn’t? What if he wandered blind and never found his way out again? Lost forever in darkness. The prospect scared him more than he had thought it would now that he stood a step away from being swallowed by the wall. He’d rather fight another Escape than go inside.

“She wouldn’t have sent me if it wasn’t safe.” Evar wasn’t sure that was true, but he repeated it again, as if saying the words out loud would somehow help them to be correct. “There are doors—so there must be something on the other side.”

He walked forward, holding tightly to his fear. It was only once inside and having taken twenty or so paces that Evar remembered he’d read somewhere that blindfolded men with nothing to guide them quickly ended up walking in circles no matter how hard they tried to maintain a straight path.

The gasp Evar gave when he unexpectedly stepped out into the light once more was that of a man emerging from deep water after a long struggle beneath the surface. He glanced at the shelves arrayed before him then took the opportunity to begin a map, scratching it with the claw onto the leather of his jerkin.

He crossed fifteen library chambers before he finally emerged from the side of a mountain after a last, much longer, trip through darkness where he had resigned himself to wandering lost for eternity, most of which would be spent broken-minded and insane.

—

Evar won free of the rock into a darkness almost as alien to him, but one that, compared to the blindness of the mountain, was alive with light. A cold white twinkling perforated the void above him. Stars, he presumed, though they were nothing like he had imagined they might be. The books had spoken of unimaginably huge spheres of fire wheeling through an emptiness that made even them seem small.

The craggy stone beneath his feet lay too steep for boulders to keep their place. Had gravity been able to set a finger on Evar it would have hauled him down too. But, like the wind that Evar could hear and not feel, it ignored him.

Evar had often read of the wind’s moaning, but the texts had never prepared him for the truth of its voice. For the longest time he stood, hunting its source, convinced that some beast must be nearby, hidden in the night, howling its hunger at him. A moment of curiosity saw him take from his pocket the corner of parchment that he’d found at the edge of Livira’s pool on his first visit to the Exchange. He held it out between finger and thumb. Immediately it began to flutter. Its dance grew faster and more wild when he shifted his grip to the very edge—as if it were only a ghost when in his possession and felt the wind most strongly when he had least contact with it. With an unexpected howl the wind tore it from him and in an eye-blink the night had it.

“Damnation...” Evar had meant to keep it. He’d lost Livira and now he’d even lost almost the last evidence of her existence. Not wanting to think about his failures, Evar turned his attention to what lay before him.

Far below the mountainside a carpet of pinpoint lights spread itself across a valley. These lights were warmer and more organised than the stars, picking out lines and grids. All around was blackness, save on one side where an even larger area lay covered with tiny dots of light scattered around larger patches whose orange glow danced as if partnering the twinkle in the heavens high above.

Evar crouched, studying the lights below. It took a while to make sense of them.

“It’s a city,” he muttered into the wind. And outside it a horde waited around countless campfires.

Mayland, with so many histories archived in his mind, and Clovis, with her intimate understanding of endless battlefields, could between them pick apart any conflict and know it better than they knew each other. Evar had only a fraction of their particular expertise, but he hardly needed even a fraction of that to see that this was a city about to be attacked, and by a force far larger than it could hope to withstand.

Few things are worse enemies of civilisation than a corrupt official, but an honest official of corrupt laws is definitely one of them.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes, by Juvenal

CHAPTER 36

Livira

Livira’s tumble came to an abrupt halt against a bookcase. She sat with her back against it, half-stunned for a moment, before casting about left and right in search of the Escape that had carried her through the portal.

Nothing.

In fact, there wasn’t even a portal. “Evar?”

An ominous cracking sound made her look up. The ceiling falling towards her in pieces would have shocked her less than what she saw. The assistant was dangling above her, very nearly at the top of the shelf, suspended from the rope around her ankle. The grey of her skin had darkened and a few last wisps of black smoke were being drawn into her head through the cratered wound on her temple. She flexed one midnight arm accompanied by another violent cracking noise. More sharp retorts as her head moved, neck craning just like Livira’s so that the assistant looked down at her with black eyes invisible in the blackness of her face.

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