Page 105 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Livira shaped her lips for the words she needed. She had learned the language out of stubbornness perhaps, or the desire to take better hold of what had been done to her. The sabbers had murdered and enslaved. They continued to do it. And while they had hidden from her behind their confounding language they had been a mystery, holding yet another kind of power over her. With their tongue on her lips, she might still fail to understand their violence and they might still be a mystery, but at least she had a key with which to unlock them. “I need to know the Raven’s name.” She held the feather between them.

The guide opened his mouth and for a long moment there was nothing more. Livira feared that the life Volente had put into him had run back out, but just as she was about to say so, he spoke. “Edgarallen.”

“And how do I—” But the fire had gone entirely now, and Livira realised she had slipped back into her native tongue.

Livira took a step back. She pulled the Raven’s feather from her inner pocket. Name and feather. Could it really be so simple? No circle of runes, no ritual? She held it up.

“Edgarallen!”

“SQUAWK?”

And there he was, hopping down from a nearby shelf top in a clumsy flutter of wings, as if he’d been watching the whole time, just waiting for them to get it right.

—

With the Raven—now sporting an additional feather, having reclaimed the one Livira used to summon him—gaining entrance to Chamber 7 proved easy. Livira’s relief at not seeing the corrupted assistant standing there waiting for them was both immediate and huge. She knew it could still be active in the chamber beyond, and steeled herself against the likelihood. Shoulder to shoulder, she and Arpix advanced through the vanishing door. They followed the Raven along the corridor and came to a halt in the clearing at the entrance. Arpix’s face was a mask.

“You’re stuck between awe at being in a forbidden chamber and disappointment that it looks like most of the rest?”

“Mostly I’m just terrified that one of the monsters you’re always meeting is going to kill me.”

Dogs, and small children, are well known for showing an interest in the ownership of an object only after another has tried to claim it. Sadly, many adults are too. Not all such struggles are, however, without epiphany. On rare occasions, we realise that while competition may have made us look with new eyes at some familiar thing, we have, unknown to ourselves, always held in our secret hearts the truth that this was precious to us, something holy, and that had it ever been threatened we would have stood in the fire’s path to defend it.

Fatherhood, by Jorg of Ancrath

CHAPTER 45

Evar

Evar left the city to fall. It burned at his back while he climbed the mountain. It shamed him but he couldn’t stand as silent, helpless witness to the slaughter of his people. Not again. This thing had already happened. This was his past. Somewhere in the library would be an account of it, maybe dozens, where a scholar from some other city would have failed to capture the horror of the suffering, failed to tie to the page the screaming that tore the night as fire found flesh. A dry history would record in sterile numbers the toll taken by the concussive blasts as projectile weapons hurled death into the night, as sword edges sought bone, as arrows hissed towards their targets.

This time the blackness and silence of the rock’s embrace was welcome. Evar ghosted through the stone, less worried that he might lose his way forever than that he might emerge once more amid the sabbers’ carnage.

The library’s stillness waited for him, unruffled by the slaughter unfolding less than a mile from its doors. The sabbers would come here too, Evar knew it. With their swords and spears, spilling more blood among the shelves. They would bring their fire too. Animals of their kind would have no regard for learning. He understood the char wall now. Some remnant of his people must have fled to the library chambers and then, chased by fire, they must have built barricades to save themselves. Though why the doors hadn’t held back the flames Evar couldn’t say.

The horrors of passing through the two-hundred-yard thickness of library walls hardly registered with Evar, so deeply was he wrapped in his thoughts. He came at last to the chamber where the assistant’s relentless work to populate the space with new books continued.

“You need to run. The sabbers are coming!” Evar strode towards her. “With fire!”

The assistant didn’t even look up.

“You need to run!” Evar shook his head. “Better still—stop them!”

She continued to stack books.

Evar went to the pool. “All this is going to burn!” He frowned, studying her indifference. For him this had all happened. The sabbers had come. Or they hadn’t. And yet he was the one passionate about it, while the assistant paid him no attention though he knew she could both hear and see him. “Do something! Do anything!”

Still she stacked books.

It occurred to Evar then that the assistants might hold a very different view of time to his own. He expected this one to act because his past was her “now.” But what if, like the library itself, they stood outside time, or at least observed it from a different angle? Maybe to an assistant the present and future were as fixed as the past. Either way, it was clear he couldn’t argue her into doing anything other than what she would have done if he had never been here.

With a sigh as deep as the pool before him, Evar dropped into the water.

—

Evar clambered from the water’s cold into the warmth of the forest. It had been in his mind to hunt immediately for any sign of the Escapes that had pursued him, and to be ready to run. The sight of the woman in white put all that from his mind. She lay in a comfortable sprawl in the grass beside the pool, one arm cushioning her sleeping head, a flood of black hair giving way to the green. A white robe revealed only her uppermost contour, the shape of her shoulder, the gentle hollow of her waist, the swell of her hip. She was barefoot, two shoes lying close by as if they’d been kicked off.

Evar gained his feet slowly, unwilling to wake her. The wood stood just as it had before. In the distance along the row of pools leading ahead of him he could see the tiny black dot that his knife had made at the edge of his home pool.

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