Page 101 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Arpix thumped the book’s spine with the heel of his hand, surprising Livira. His patience normally outlasted hers by at least a factor of ten. The dog’s muzzle, followed by its eyes and forehead, emerged from the wall and its growl rumbled through the rock. Arpix glanced around, distractedly. “What in creation is that?”

“Earthquake,” Livira said, trying to shoo the dog away without drawing Arpix’s attention to it.

“We don’t get earthquakes here.” Arpix stared at her odd jerking movements and she stopped. He shook his head and his attention returned to the book, striking it again. He started to almost claw at it, digging his fingernails into the edge of the spine. The dog’s shoulders emerged and it growled again, the sound so deep that it carried no hint of direction. Arpix stood, looking everywhere except directly behind him and missing the dog by the smallest of margins. “What in the hells is going on?”

“I really don’t think you should be hitting the book.” Livira moved to try and save it from him. “We’re librarians after all. It’s our job to preserve—”

“You were just about to take a chisel to the thing!” Arpix accused. He sat back down. “All... I need to...” He started straining at the book again, pushing at the spine and covers with the flats of his hands. “...do is... just... get...” The growl came still louder. The dog was almost half out of the wall now and Livira didn’t need to see any detail to know that its mouth was open wide enough to take Arpix’s head in one bite. Livira threw herself at the bed to wrest the book from Arpix’s grasp. Somehow, they both ended up tumbling backwards together, landing in a heap on the floor.

“What the... How?” Livira tried to disentangle herself from Arpix’s ridiculously long limbs. The book that had resisted all her efforts lay open, a spray of pages rising between the two covers.

“I thought I saw...” Arpix rolled her off him and patted the wall where the dog had been. “It looked like... something black.”

“Never mind that!” Livira started to leaf through the book in wonder. “How did you open it?”

“Oh.” Arpix turned away from the wall, frowning. “It’s Al-Athan. They sometimes used to disguise the spine as a lock, and to open the book you need to try the other side and unclip the bit that looks like a spine.”

—

For a day and a night Livira did nothing except read The Forest Between. She sat at her desk with the book in a reading stand before her and stared at each page in turn. Arpix said it looked as if she were trying to burn the words directly into her brain. He stood behind her for a while, reading along, but complained that she was ready to turn each page before he was a quarter of the way through it. In the end he went about his own business, returning periodically with food and drink, and to suggest, then cajole, and finally threaten her into bed for the sleep she so clearly needed.

Livira resisted sleep. Her act of theft could be discovered at any moment and the book taken back. The volume was a collection of fables and stories with varying degrees of connection to the Exchange. The book was a journey, a voyage punctuated by minor secrets, hopefully on the way to a larger truth. One astonishing claim, backing up something Arpix had once said, was that every few centuries the chambers themselves moved, all of them together, as if in some great, slow dance, gradually shuffling the pack. This at least went some way towards explaining why such labours appeared to have been lavished on chambers so far from the entrance.

Another claim was that although Mechanisms were very rare, a search of sufficient length would discover many of them scattered throughout the library’s reading rooms.

About the Exchange itself, the book was less direct. An understanding of the place, even the fact of its existence, didn’t emerge from the individual stories so much as from the overlap between them. In the common ground that threaded through tales separated by centuries, even millennia, and by distances so vast that Livira’s mind could not encompass them, a picture of the Exchange emerged. In truth it didn’t add a great deal to what Livira had gathered first-hand. A forest beyond time, in which libraries across time and space were connected. The assistants used the place to bring books from far away and long ago to restock libraries that had room for more.

What Livira wanted was a way to reach it. The stories were at their vaguest when it came to this vital component. Wanderers stumbling through portals, falling into pools, borne there by magic rings or wizard’s spells—in one case even an enchanted button!—none of this was of any use to Livira when no specific means of reaching any of these pools, portals, rings, or wizards were mentioned.

Worryingly, Livira was running out of book. The ever-thinning wedge of pages between her current one and the back cover was growing alarmingly slim. Perhaps an answer lay hidden between the lines of what she’d already read. A puzzle waiting to be unpicked. But for a thief, expecting imminent discovery if she didn’t manage to return the book undetected, these were not the fruits she’d hoped her larceny would bear.

Suddenly there it was in front of her with fewer than a dozen pages left to go. A circle drawn with the blood of a white one will open the way to the wood.

“Huh? What?” Arpix sat up sharply from the bed. “I wasn’t asleep.”

Livira hadn’t even noticed him come back or go into the bedroom. He came through into the office knuckling his eyes and yawning. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You squealed. Or squeaked. Or shrieked. A bit of all three really.”

“ ‘A circle drawn with the blood of a white one will open the way to the wood,’ ” Livira read out loud.

“You might as well ask for a moon. The assistants are indestructible. Not that I’d want to hurt one anyway.” Arpix rubbed the back of his neck and yawned again. “All sounds a bit primitive to me. It’s probably just a fairy-tale way of saying that the ability to open portals is in their blood. If they even have blood.”

“They do.” It was the memory of seeing it that made Livira think that the book had it right. There had been something otherworldly about the shimmer of that blood. Just looking at it had started to rotate her thoughts within her skull. “They do have blood. I’ve seen it.”

Arpix frowned. “Where?”

“In Chamber Seven. When I moved the assistant from where she’d fallen. There was blood under her, from the wound in her temple.”

“Great. So, to get to the place you can’t get to you need to get to another place you can’t get to.”

“The Raven can get me in,” Livira said. “And I know how to summon it.”

“Well, you certainly know how not to summon it.” Arpix had helped out in a number of Livira’s many attempts to call the Raven, the product of months of research, and they’d all failed. The circle of carefully drawn runes interspersed with the skulls of ravens and activated by a long incantation in modern Rillspan had had the most success. After two hours of chanting in a distant corner of the library a bird-shaped shadow had appeared within the circle. But it never became any more solid and Arpix said it was a form of self-hypnotism that had created it rather than some connection to the Raven.

“We need one of its feathers, and we need its name,” Livira said.

“Neither of which we have.”

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