Page 108 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

She saw them everywhere. She saw them dancing on fence-tops, along old gutters, between the pegs on the washing line. She called them the “dancers,” but then “angels” because Mam said that was proper if she couldn’t stop talking about them.

“During the Dance,” by Mark Lawrence

CHAPTER 46

Livira

Livira’s memory had navigated them to the spot where the assistant had lain immobile for untold years and where the portal had stood. Both were gone now but the blood remained, a pearlescent patch covering an area the size of Livira’s hand. The surface of it entranced the eye, offering both crimson and silver in a curious, everchanging swirl.

Livira knelt beside it and took the gluing brush she’d lifted from the bookbinder stores on the way out.

“Careful!” Arpix said unhelpfully.

Livira ignored him. She used the brush to soak up or lift as much of the blood as she could. She stood, rotating the brush slowly to prevent drips, and held a worn suede cloth beneath it in case she failed. “Let’s go.”

They had already decided not to draw the portal in the forbidden chamber. Immediately Livira headed for the chamber’s far door. Arpix followed and the Raven hopped along after. The bird had fallen some way behind by the time they reached the door and for several anxious minutes Arpix voiced his concern that they were trapped. Livira worried that he was right, but pointed out that if the blood worked they could leave without needing the door.

“I should have carried him!” Arpix exclaimed and was going to say more when the Raven hopped into sight.

With the door open and with the need to test the blood burning in her, Livira started to hurry away. The Raven watched them go, uttering a soft squawk. Livira turned. “Thank you. Thank you so much. Can’t you come with us?”

But just as Volente had left them at the metal man, Edgarallen seemed decided that his service had also run its course.

They still had a way to go until they reached the place they’d decided to draw the portal. Somewhere where the books were sufficiently dull and obscure that nobody was likely to visit the aisle for years to come.

After what seemed an interminable period of walking, brush twirling, brush twirling, and more walking they reached their destination, standing face to face with the chamber wall. Finally the time to draw the circle had come.

“You should make it smaller.” Arpix indicated a circle he could encompass with both arms. “In case there’s not enough blood.”

Livira frowned. “I don’t want to be crawling down a rabbit hole!” But she worried he might be right. If the brush didn’t hold enough blood—or paint as she now thought of it—to close the circle, then what would happen? Would it all be wasted? “I’ll start off and judge it as I go.”

And so, with a trembling hand that felt as clumsy as if she were using her foot instead, Livira began to paint her circle on the wall.

It turned out to be more of a squashed oval, taller than it was wide, and neither wide nor tall. As Livira drew the ever-drier brush to complete the loop at shoulder height, attempting to meet the earlier overambitious strokes, it left an increasingly narrow and patchy line. “Damnation.” Her heart pounded more fiercely by the moment. It wasn’t as if there were more assistant blood to be had. “You were right. I should have made a rabbit ho—” But the brush re-joined its path, and without pause or ceremony the encircled space lit with a familiar unworldly shimmer.

Not waiting for discussion Livira had bowed her head and stepped through the crude circle. She had emerged almost instantly from one of the Exchange’s many pools. The alarm at Arpix’s failure to join her, and the failed hunt for him had, after some time, deposited her at the edge of the pool that Evar seemed to have vanished into. And somehow, against all odds, she had slept.

—

Now, reunited with Evar the pair jumped into their chosen pool, hand in hand. But where her own badly sketched portal had delivered her smoothly to the Exchange, this pool saw her pitched into a tumbling fall through nothingness. She tried to hold to her thought of a time of peace, one in which an unexpected conflict wouldn’t spring up to consume everything as it had during Evar’s visit to the city.

To keep a focused thought in your mind while falling, a thought other than something concerned with hitting the ground, is difficult. To do it whilst blind and trying to keep a grip on another’s hand: harder still. And yet Livira still managed to find room for the worry that perhaps her demand was too taxing, and that in every when that the pool might take her to the city was full of death and battle and murder in the alleyways.

The pool she finally crawled out of felt as if it were boiling, though not only with heat but also with emotion and pain. She lay gasping in sunshine so bright that she had to screw her eyes shut against it.

“Evar?” In a panic she realised that she’d lost his hand.

“Here.” He was close by and the distracted way he’d spoken that single word told her she was not the centre of his attention.

Livira sat up, blinking. She found herself on the mountainside staring up at the stone head of a roaring wolf-like being, a head so big that its open throat was large enough to drive a wagon through. It wasn’t the wolf’s head that Evar was staring at, though. Hundreds of assistants, both male and female, stood in rows on the steps leading up into the jaws, arrayed like an audience for Evar and Livira’s arrival. Some, however, were departing already, turning back to vanish into the wolf’s throat as if the show had already ended and neither Evar nor Livira was worthy of their time.

“I know this place.” On her arrival at the library, Yute had told her that the entrance he was taking her towards had once been styled as the head of a roaring god. Now she was seeing it with her own eyes.

“I never thought there could be so many...” Evar breathed.

“Me neither.” There could be no way this many assistants inhabited the chambers Livira had explored so far.

Livira got to her feet. The wonders didn’t stop with the ranks of assistants. There were not one, but two pools set side by side into the stone platform before the library entrance and it seemed that she and Evar had emerged from different ones. Neither pool looked anything like the ones in the Exchange but more like her own recent blood-drawn effort. But where that had been a circle daubed with less than a cupful of the oily silver-red liquid, these looked like the aftermath of two bloody murders. The light within them seemed to bubble and spit, the blood beneath showing through the shimmer here and there, swirling, constantly in motion.

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