Page 93 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Fucker got me too.” He swayed dangerously as he said it, as if the admission had suddenly made the consequences real.

Livira came up on the open side of the steps and got his arm over her shoulders.

“Let me help.” Yute hurried up behind her.

“No room.” Livira took as much of Malar’s weight as she could, thankful that he wasn’t a large man. “Besides, you can barely get yourself up these stairs.”

—

Getting Malar to Yute’s house left Livira panting with effort and drenched in sweat. She was more scared, far more scared, supporting Malar’s rapidly weakening progress through the night than she had been when following him. She had imagined him invincible. Perhaps that was what his warning had been about. She might be the hero of her own story, but real life didn’t care about that, and Malar had known it.

“All the gods in heaven!” Salamonda greeted them at the doorway after Yute’s knock. “Get him on the table!”

With Malar on the kitchen table, curled about his wound, the ingredients for some or other meal now scattered to the floor, Salamonda dispatched Yute to get a doctor.

“Go hide upstairs.” Malar got the words past clenched teeth. Before Livira could protest he added, “I didn’t bleed my way here so some fucker could just follow us in and gut you.” He looked at Salamonda. “Apologies for my language, madam.”

She shook her head. “Any fucker who comes after Livira is going to have me to deal with.” She brandished a meat cleaver that Livira hadn’t seen her snatch from the table. “Go on up, girl. Anyone tries the stairs without saying who they are—throw Wentworth at them.”

Livira nodded, shot Malar what she hoped was a look warning him not to die, and hurried to the stairs. She wasn’t sure she could pick up Wentworth, let alone throw him, and thought the cat would probably turn on her in the process. She headed upwards, pausing at each storey to look for a weapon. If there was trouble downstairs, she planned to reappear, appropriately armed.

Yute’s house turned out to be woefully lacking in the weapons department and Livira soon came to realise that she had missed her best chance by failing to secure a knife in the kitchen. She picked up an oil lamp from Yute’s study and carried it to the top storey. His daughter’s room remained unchanged from Livira’s last visit. It carried an air, not of neglect but of... waiting. It reminded her of the library in a way, though it was the room below that smelled of books rather than this one.

Realising just how tired she was, Livira sat on the bed. Exhaustion from her efforts with Malar trembled through her limbs. She lay back and watched the shadows jitter across the ceiling.

—

“Livira?”

“I wasn’t asleep,” Livira lied, sitting up with a jolt. It seemed impossible that she had fallen asleep.

“Yolanda always said that when I woke her.” Yute stood at the foot of the bed. A pale ghost. “It’s her birthday today. She would have been twenty-six.”

Livira didn’t have words for that. Suddenly she remembered the night’s events. “Malar!”

“Malar should recover. The doctor has stitched his wound.”

“He wouldn’t have a wound if you hadn’t made me a librarian. Why did you do that? And don’t try to distract me by saying I deserved it.”

Yute took the chair. In the lamplight he looked ghostly white, like something apart from the world, as if he weren’t part of humanity at all, something closer to an assistant than to a man like Malar. She wondered about that, Yute and the head librarian, recently rumoured to be his equally pale sister. Where had the pair come from? And was Yute’s relationship with the library somehow deeper than everyone else’s, or were the mysteries around him just the smoke of her own ignorance?

Livira shook the sleep from her head and found that once more he was merely Yute, as tired and as old as the day he found her on the steps of the Allocation Hall. “Why did I do it? I exhausted subtlety. I failed at manipulation and at direct appeal. Challenge was all that remained to me.”

“What are you talking about?”

Yute sighed. “If I can’t even get the king to see people from the Dust as properly human and deserving of respect... If I can’t manage to make him see other humans as human, then how can I possibly hope for negotiations with the sabbers?”

Livira’s frown deepened. “How can you? I mean why would you? When the sabbers come to our walls they deserve to be shot.”

Yute leaned back into his chair, shadows devouring his face. “Do you remember when you came to see me here the last time?”

Livira nodded and decided not to argue that she had been merely passing and if not for Salamonda hauling her in they wouldn’t have spoken.

“I talked about curses. You’ll remember because you remember everything.”

Livira nodded again. The passage of years had failed to fully unravel the puzzles that Yute posed her that day.

“Who first built this city?” Yute asked her.

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