Page 97 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

After three years of dead ends in her search for a way back to the Exchange, Livira came through her own volition to the end of a long corridor and what would have been yet another dead end but for the fact that it held a door. The door to Yamala’s quarters. Three years of failure had driven Livira to the corridor. The door before her would, she hoped, open onto a path that would lead her back to the forest that grew between moments, where Evar—trapped like an insect in amber—surely waited for her return.

It had been the tirelessly observant and endlessly methodical Arpix who had found the book. Not a book that revealed how to enter the Exchange, but a book that held lengthy references to another volume that reputedly did exactly that: The Forest Between, by Celyn Lewis. It had been Livira who convinced herself that the key to finding this tome must lie within Head Librarian Yamala’s personal quarters. Perhaps she might even have an actual copy of it there, for gods knew Livira had searched the library long and hard for it, even using several minor guides who had been both difficult to find and difficult to motivate.

Arpix took the idea that the way forward lay behind Yamala’s door as another dead end. Livira took it as a challenge. She hadn’t told Arpix about her plan though. At best he would try to stop her. At worst he would insist on helping—thereby exposing himself to the likely ruinous consequences of failure.

—

The lock on Yamala’s door wasn’t a particularly serious one but working on it at the end of a brightly lit corridor, onto which opened the front doors of all the deputies and eight other senior librarians of the second circle, was a logistical nightmare. The unrelenting brightness of the library complex proved to be Yamala’s most effective security measure.

Livira had taken various texts on espionage into the Mechanism over the years and with regret had had to skip through the lengthy sections on skulking through shadows given that there were none to be found in the places which most interested her.

Identifying Yamala’s door had been easy enough. The deputy heads trekked in through it on regular occasions—all save Yute, who rarely seemed to visit the library—and nobody but the deputies ever came out of it. It seemed that the head librarian must be bed-bound, perhaps because of her great age. Or maybe, as Carlotte had once mischievously speculated, she had died long ago and the deputies had agreed to rule as a team, using her quarters as a convenient meeting spot. “Maybe they killed her! All four of them stabbed her. And her mummified body sits at the head of their meeting table,” Carlotte had concluded.

Livira worked her picks, expecting at any moment that one of the librarians would return early from the many and varied tasks which currently occupied them—some of the tasks entirely her doing. She forced herself to calmness and focused on the mechanism. Eventually it surrendered to her ministrations.

Having defeated the lock, Livira eased through the door, silently cursing the ubiquitous brightness that offered as little chance of concealment in the room beyond as in the corridor she’d just left. Thankfully, it was empty and neither her list of feeble excuses nor her sprinting skills were required.

Breaking in had been a huge risk. Livira’s heart thundered in her chest, her palms sweat-slick. If she hadn’t been banging her head against a solid wall for so long, she would never have gone to such extremes. As far as Livira was concerned, the doors she was now daring were doors that stood between her and the Exchange. Between her and Evar. Whether he needed her or not, it was her duty to find him and learn the answer to that question. He had risked his life to save hers. She would risk her livelihood to see if he still needed saving in turn. She blamed Yute to some degree. She was sure he could help her but, just as on every other occasion, all he would do was steer her with the vaguest of touches, expecting her to discover the truth by herself, applying the same approach to her as to the whole city of Crath.

Livira closed the head librarian’s front door behind her. Her only protection from identification was the stolen trainee robes that she now struggled into, raising the hood to shroud her face. The room she’d entered was clearly where the deputies met, a large square chamber with an impressive round table of polished oak at its centre. Carlotte would have been disappointed by the lack of mummified remains. A thick carpet covered the stone floor, a wonder of colour and texture woven in the geometric styles favoured in the western nations. Everything was still and silent.

Each of the four walls had a door set into it. Livira crossed to the one opposite, her feet making no sound on the softness beneath them. At the back of her mind a small, lone voice was screaming that she should turn back now. Screaming that the library had rested its faith on her shoulders. Yamala had appointed her in the face of the king’s own decree—she was a representative of all those that came in from the Dust now.

Livira closed her ears to the voice of her conscience and reached for the door handle. She had barely set her hand upon the cold metal when the door began to open.

... recommend a three-hundred-gallon barrel. Fill to one-third of its depth with manure. Cows are an excellent source, their ordure being both copious and easy to pour. The remaining volume should be filled with urine. In times of tension, recruit others to the effort. The task will take a single person at least a year, and an additional six months of fermenting before the process of extracting saltpetre can begin.

Brew Your Own War, by Redding Sharp

CHAPTER 42

Livira

If not for playing through scenes like this many times within the Mechanism, Livira would have been caught flat-footed as the door opened. Her game would have been up right there and then, with disastrous consequences.

With no time to spare, Livira managed to veer to her left and position herself against the wall behind the swing of the door. It came perilously close to hitting her. Worse though, it immediately began to swing back. For a split second Livira reached for it, intending to hang on and use it as a shield between her and the other person, delaying the inevitable discovery. She let her reaching hand fall, knowing it was useless.

The door swung shut, revealing the retreating back of someone dressed in a pale green tunic and clutching a book. Where the figure’s bare arms showed, the skin was white as bone. Yute’s name opened Livira’s lips, but she kept it there. This was a woman; she was sure of it. The woman’s hair fell in a white river to somewhere between her shoulders and she had a slightness to her that made even Yute’s narrowness seem robust.

Livira remained silent, pressed to the stone, certain that she must be seen, if not in this moment, then in the next. But the woman opened the door to the left and went through, shutting it behind her, without once glancing back and noticing the blue-robed Livira against the wall. It took what felt an age before Livira remembered to draw breath again—her heart, which had been beating so hard when she entered the room, had seemed to stop entirely for the duration of the head librarian’s passage. It had to be Yamala. There was no one in the library so pale except Yute, and none so pale as the pair of them in the whole city beyond. Livira imagined them both assistants made flesh.

Fighting the urge to turn and run, Livira went to reopen the door through which the head librarian had come with such focused determination.

Locked. The woman hadn’t had time to lock it but somehow it was locked. Livira knelt and, with the need to leave trembling in her hands, she set to work once more with her lock picks. The tremble didn’t help. The lock refused to surrender. From time to time, Livira would startle from the depths of her concentration and shoot a frightened glance over her shoulder, expecting to see the head librarian standing there watching. She considered abandoning the effort several times. The urge to flee to the safety of her own quarters became overwhelming. She was staking her whole existence on the rumour of a book that Yamala might not even have and, even if she did, might not be behind this door. If she was caught the very least she could expect would be exile to the streets of Crath to pick out a mean existence in its back alleys. She’d probably be beaten to within an inch of her life first. They might accuse Arpix of helping her, or even Meelan, or—

CLICK.

The lock turned. Livira exhaled slowly. Misbehaviour had been much easier when she’d had little to lose, nobody depending on her, and nobody else to bring down. She opened the door and slipped through, closing it quietly behind her. She found herself in a chamber perhaps a quarter of the size of the trainee library, filled with packed shelves.

“A librarian with their own library.” Livira began to move between the shelves. “Figures.”

Unlike the library proper, where the gems were hidden among legions of the mediocre, irrelevant, and outdated, Yamala’s shelves boasted one treasure after another, volumes that a librarian might kill for—and, if the old tales were to be believed, sometimes actually had killed for. Almost every book here was a work alluded to in other prized volumes but never to be found despite the competing claims of even the most up-to-date indexes.

Livira longed to just nail the door shut and ensconce herself in this place for however many years it would take to read everything. She was here on a mission though, armed with not only the title and author of a particular book but its full description.

The shelves were set facing the door with access to the gaps between them from either side as they didn’t quite reach the walls. Letting her fingers trail book spines, Livira hurried along the first of the aisles, eyes flitting from ceiling to floor in search of the object of her quest. She thought it foolish of Yamala to keep this wealth of books in a place that the king’s soldiers could so easily discover. Scattered amongst the near-infinite collection of the library they would be safe and reachable only through the doubtless encrypted index the head librarian maintained. It seemed, though, that Yamala favoured convenience over caution and relied on the city’s belief that the only key to such knowledge lay within her head.

It took Livira far longer than she wanted to find the book she was after, but far less time than might reasonably be expected given the size of the collection. Twelve rows in she hefted the locked, iron-bound tome from its place. “Got you!” She shuffled the neighbours together to hide the gap. With the heavy volume filling her book satchel and straining the stitching, she crept towards the exit. Regardless of her load, she felt a weight lifted from her shoulders. Against all the odds and despite her close brush with the head librarian, she was going to make it! In her mind she was already planning her triumphant reveal to Arpix.

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