Page 104 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Livira couldn’t help but echo his smile. This was a different Arpix. She should tell Carlotte to turn up with a dog next time if she wanted to get under Arpix’s covers. “Well, let’s see how good this one can be.” She turned to address him. “Volente, please take us through that door.” She pointed to it.

Volente advanced on the door. Livira and Arpix exchanged glances and followed.

Volente reached the door and walked through it. Livira slowed, reaching out instinctively as she closed on the white surface.

“Damn.” Her fingers rested against the door. “Volente!” She backed away.

The dog’s head reappeared through the door.

“Can’t you open it?”

The dog just looked at her.

“Maybe he helps by fetching books,” Arpix suggested. “Dogs are good at fetching things.”

“That’s not exactly something I can test,” Livira grumbled. “I don’t know the names of any books in Chamber Seven. And it wouldn’t help us anyway.”

“Didn’t the Raven want you to take a corner of one page back in there? Maybe if you had a whole book from in there it would come after you again?”

Livira didn’t think it likely, but now that she thought about it, she had seen the title of one book out of the many millions in the chamber: the title of the book her scrap had come from. At the time she hadn’t been able to read Crunian Four, but she could now, and if she could remember the shape of the letters... Even for Livira’s steel-trap memory it was a big stretch. But she had looked at the front cover at the time, all those years ago, and it had mattered to her. She remembered recognising the letters from her scrap.

“Are you all right?” Arpix stepped into her line of sight. “You went quiet.”

She raised a hand. “Thinking.” Letters and words shuffled around in her mind’s eye, some glowing brighter than others, some seeking partners, making clumps, actual words. Volente came back and sat beside her. Time passed. “No.” Livira exhaled explosively. “Something about love... but that’s all I can get.” Another idea occurred to her. “Volente, fetch me the Raven!”

The hound quivered, glanced at the wall to the right, then settled down closer to the ground, bowing his great head to rest between his front legs.

“I think that’s a no,” Arpix said.

Livira furrowed her brow. “How about its name? Can you bring me the Raven’s name, Volente?”

The dog looked up at her then stood and began to walk away, slowly. After ten yards it looked back over its shoulder at them. Arpix shrugged. “Let’s follow.”

Volente led them for two miles, crossing the chamber to the door where the immobile humanoid guide stood. The man’s blind eyes still pointed towards a nothing above the shelves, the spars of his ruined wings still rising above him, the brown metal of his body glistening slightly in the directionless light.

Volente went to sniff at the metal man, starting at his feet and seeming to follow a scent up through his leg, stomach, chest.

“What’s he doing?” Arpix stared, perplexed.

The dog went up on his hind legs, his front paws on the metal man’s shoulders. The bark, if that’s what it was, took Livira completely by surprise. A concussive sound that shoved her through the air. She found herself on the ground, surfacing through a thick layer of her own confusion, and feeling as if she’d been punched everywhere. Her ears, on the other hand, whilst ringing slightly, were less impacted than by one of the Raven’s scoldings.

She helped Arpix up, or he helped her up—it was hard to tell, what with them both still staggering. She half expected to see flattened shelves and loose pages fluttering down from on high, but the library appeared unchanged. The metal man was still standing in exactly the same position. But now that Livira looked she could see that there was a fire in his eyes that hadn’t been there before. With a grating sound he turned his head to look at her. It seemed that Volente’s bark had been loud enough to wake the dead.

Tentatively, Livira approached the man, suddenly conscious of his height and the span of his reaching wings. No part of him moved except his eyes and his head.

“Hello?” The metal man had been recorded as immobile in books from two previous eras. He’d made no recorded move in centuries. Livira had no idea how to greet his awakening. Nobody was really even sure that he had been a guide.

The man’s lips moved, and his voice rolled out, deep but surprisingly melodic. Livira had no idea what he was saying. She looked at Arpix.

“I don’t recognise the language.”

The metal man spoke again in a different tongue. Livira didn’t recognise this one either, but she was enough of a linguist to know that it was different from the first. The guide tilted his head, his eyes burning slightly more brightly, and uttered a new phrase in a third language. He moved smoothly on into a fourth and a fifth. By the fifteenth repetition—and she felt they were repetitions—Livira was less amazed that the guide knew so many tongues and yet didn’t speak hers than she was by the fact there were so many languages that neither she nor Arpix not only didn’t speak but couldn’t even guess an origin for.

It went on for an age. As time passed, the fire in the guide’s eyes began to dim. His voice grew deeper and slower. In the end both of them sat down with the dog beside them and listened with their heads down. When the words finally did make sense Livira was so numbed by the prior flood of incomprehension that it took her a moment to realise it. “Wait!” She got to her feet. “That was...” It didn’t seem likely but surely had been. “That was sabber-tongue?

“You speak sabber?” Livira formed the words slowly. She had taught herself the language from a book and only spoken it with Yute. The text stated that the written form was created by men to teach the spoken language, the new alphabet coined to represent sounds that regular letters couldn’t capture. The librarians frowned upon sabber-tongue as a waste of time. Only one book was known to be written in it, a tome filled with love poetry that was believed to have been translated ironically. Livira tried again, making more effort to re-create the inhuman sounds, growling it out: “You speak sabbertine?”—literally: “You speak the language of the enemy?”

“I do.” The metal man inclined his head, neck joints grating. The fire in his eyes guttered like a candle flame exhausting its wax. “Why has Volente awakened me?” The words were sabbertine but put through the mangle. The years had changed it, no doubt, as they changed everything save the library.

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