Page 100 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Who is it?” She sounded terrified even to herself.

“Are you all right?” Arpix’s voice.

“Yes.” Livira fought to speak steadily. “Just busy.”

“You don’t sound all right...”

“I’m fine.”

“Why are we speaking through this door then?”

“I’m busy.”

“New book?”

“Yes—I mean no.” He’d never go away if he thought she had a book worth blowing him off for. “Uh. It’s women’s problems.” Genius. If anything was going to get rid of Arpix it was some basic biology. This was a man who preferred to think of all animals, people included, in terms of topology, as tori to be precise.

A long silence.

“Livira?”

“Yes?”

“Are you lying?”

Livira let out a long sigh and unbolted the door. “Don’t scream. All right? It’s safe. Safe-ish, anyway.” She glanced back at the dog and slowly opened the door.

“Why would I scream?” Arpix looked down at her with dark intensity. He’d grown extremely tall. Jella said he looked like a weed, too busy trying to gain height to fill out.

Livira blinked and swivelled back towards her bedroom door. The dog had gone. “It’s... it’s a... uh, important book.”

“I thought you said you weren’t well.” Arpix arched a brow at her.

“I thought you already knew I was lying.”

“You don’t look well,” Arpix said as he followed her to the bedroom. “You look very pale and a bit clammy. You— Oh lords above! Is that—is that Lewis’s treatise on hidden spaces?”

“I can’t open it,” Livira said miserably.

“How in the world did you find it?” Arpix knelt on the bed and touched the cover with nervous fingers, as if it were a baby or something equally mysterious.

“It wasn’t easy.” Livira had become pretty truthful with Arpix, but the truth here would just expose him to more danger.

Arpix sat on her bed, discarding his normal reserve in the excitement of such a find. He hefted the book onto his lap, then with a pained expression reached under his thigh and tugged out one of Livira’s picks that must have been sticking into his leg.

“Good luck,” Livira said. “I think I’m going to have to borrow a chisel from the bookbinders.”

Arpix discarded the pick and frowned at the book. “You can’t hack it open. Have you no respect?”

“I’ve got plenty of respect. What I haven’t got plenty of is time.”

Arpix lifted the book to eye level and pursed his lips, his frown deepening. “You’ve forgotten Zackar Gyle?”

“Nobody believes that nonsense.” Livira snorted. Though now Arpix mentioned the legend it did give her pause. Zackar Gyle had been a librarian over a hundred years ago and had spent his life in search of one book said to contain the secret of eternal life. In his dotage he’d found the book, locked just as the book in Arpix’s hands was. Zackar had struggled with the lock for an age and finally given into his frustration, smashing the clasp with a hammer. Only to find every page blank. The legend claimed that the act of forcing the book had erased all the words within. Most trainees as they progressed through their education came to understand that Zackar had been a victim of a trick rather than of magic, and that the book had always been blank. Livira, though she would never admit it, felt it probably was magic and that the old man’s act of violence had destroyed the thing he’d sought so long.

Arpix looked up from his inspection. “And why wouldn’t you have time? You’ve all the time in the world. At least until the sabbers come over the walls.”

“That’s not going to happen. They’ll be shot down from the walls like dogs—” Livira stopped, embarrassed at using the dog epithet, firstly because it was one of the king’s big lies that the sabbers bred with dogs, and secondly because a black nose had just inched out of the wall behind Arpix.

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