Page 9 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“How do they eat?”

“With their fucking mouths, just like everyone else.”

“I mean, there’s no fields,” Livira said. The settlement had fifty times the area dedicated to its huts given over to growing the food for those who lived in them.

“You didn’t notice the thousand fucking wagons, little rat?” Malar made an exaggerated gesture towards the north and south roads, the dust from a host of wheels drifting from both.

Livira frowned. “But why bring the city people food? How do they pay?”

“You’re too clever for your own fucking good, girl. Get you into trouble, that will.” Malar shook his head. The flesh around the furrows the sabber had carved across his face was still an angry red. Sweat ran from beneath hair streaked with the first touch of grey. He looked as tired as Livira felt. “Knowledge. That’s what they pay with. Whole city’s here for one reason. This is where King Oanold’s great-grandfather built the library.”

Without guilt we would all be monsters. And memory is the ink with which we list our crimes.

Notes from the trial of Edris Dean

CHAPTER 4

Evar

What are you doing?”

Evar turned with a start to find Starval standing behind him. Nobody ever heard Starval coming. The smallest and darkest of his brothers, Starval had been lost in the Mechanism while carrying a book concerned with the arts of assassination. Strange reading material for a child, Evar thought. Many decades later, the Mechanism had spat out all five of the lost children it had inadvertently swallowed. It had vomited them up together, none of them seeming a day older than when they were taken. None of them were the same though. In Starval’s case, the contents of that book and more beyond had been printed on his soul.

“Me? Doing?” Evar swallowed. With Starval there was always that moment of terror when you were certain you were going to die. Then he’d smile and you’d remember he was your brother. “I’m building a staircase.”

Starval cast a critical eye at the ramp of books Evar had piled up. Along its side the ramp was braced against a wall, and at the end by a second wall where the two formed one of the chamber’s corners. “You’ve got a way to go...”

“I’ll get there.” Evar wiped the sweat from his brow and craned his neck to take in the scale of the task. Although the ramp reached well above his head it wasn’t yet one-twentieth of the way to the ceiling.

“Dare I ask the reason for this... staircase to heaven?” Starval frowned at the structure. “You know it’s going to collapse with you on it, right?”

“I’m going to check the ceiling.”

An uncharacteristic concern creased Starval’s brow. “Is it time for Kerrol to give you the talk again?”

“I don’t care about the talk.” Kerrol would ask what he thought he was escaping from. He would remind Evar that wherever he went he would take himself with him. “I need to find—” He stopped himself. None of the others believed in her. The books they were lost with in the Mechanism had tutored them, left them with skills honed to the sharpest possible edge. Clovis the warrior, Kerrol with access to the levers of the mind, Mayland with his histories. Evar had emerged with nothing, just the sense that something had been torn from his memory, leaving a chasm so wide he could fall into it and never be found. Someone had been torn away, not something. She was out there. He knew that. And she needed him. He’d left her in danger, and he had to get back to her before it was too late.

“Well, have fun. I’m going to the Mechanism. I’m late for my turn.” Starval set a hand to Evar’s shoulder. “Don’t die here, brother. We need you.” With that he turned away and walked off towards the distant reading room, whistling a jaunty tune to challenge the library’s overwhelming silence.

Left on his own again, Evar paused to contemplate his stairway before wiping his brow once more and bending to the work. The ceiling would offer a way out. Why else would they have built it so very far from the floor?

Evar’s brother Mayland had always said that the fact they could see the walls of their prison was a blessing afforded to very few. Their cell was larger than those enjoyed by most inmates, approximately two miles on each side with a ceiling that was more of a stone sky, too high for them to be able to hit it with anything they could find to throw. There were even four doors rather than the traditional singular exit. Each of which Evar had tried ten thousand times, even the one that lay behind a hundred yards of char and ash. But he’d never examined the ceiling. None of them had.

—

Since the library offered no measure of time, its light unwavering, it was exhaustion that reeled Evar back to the pool and its green halo of crops. Save for the crop circle around the pool, the entirety of the chamber’s floor space, some two and a half thousand acres, lay covered with stacks of books. A forest in which, even now, it was easy to become lost.

He followed the chamber wall for a mile before passing the short corridor to the north door. A half mile after that he reached the corridor to the north-east reading room. The chamber boasted one more reading room, west of the south door, but this one held the Mechanism and it was to this one that Starval had gone many hours earlier.

Before striking out among the book stacks, aiming for the pool, Evar took a long look at the Mechanism. A hundred yards of corridor led to the reading room, and down it, across a sea of reading desks in tumbled disarray, Evar had a clear if distant view of the Mechanism, a grey lump large enough for all the siblings to fit inside together with room to spare, though the rules allowed only one person and one book at a time.

The Mechanism’s pull was that while a reader’s imagination could animate a book inside their head, the Mechanism would build that world around you. It offered the contents of each book as something to be physically experienced, walked through, partaken in, interrogated, shared. You could immerse yourself in the book in whatever way you might desire.

Over the centuries that Evar’s people had been trapped within the chamber the Mechanism had been their escape. Every generation or so someone who went in didn’t come out again. And even though on each of the five occasions on which such a tragedy had occurred, the victim had been a child of maybe eight or nine years, it seemed that the draw of the Mechanism was such that this was considered a price worth paying.

Evar had been the second child lost, Clovis the last. Evar had been the only one of them not to return to it after their eventual release.

He stood for a while, resting his eyes on the grey structure, wondering what adventures Starval might be experiencing within it. Typically, he spent his time honing his skills with blade, poison, or one of a score of other ways to take a life. It must be hard, Evar thought, to see real people as having value after taking the lives of so many pretend ones.

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