Page 10 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

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Evar found only Kerrol, lounging on his preferred book pile while reading a more favoured volume.

Evar had three brothers: Mayland, the historian; Starval, the murderer; and Kerrol, whose speciality they all had their own unflattering names for. Kerrol chose to refer to his calling as psychology. Kerrol said that it was in people’s nature to feel trapped, and that being unable to see what had hold of them was what led so many into dark places within their own minds. Evar, at least, knew what was holding him back. But knowing had never felt as if it helped.

Evar went to his own pile, ready for sleep, glad that his brother had nothing to say to him. He was still yawning and searching for his dreams when Clovis came through the gate in the book-built wall that served as a perimeter for their settlement. She rounded the corner sharply, all the angles of her body pointing towards trouble. Evar got to his feet with a groan, braced for the storm. Kerrol, lounging nearby, looked up from his book.

“Defend yourself, little brother.” Clovis came on without pause.

Evar was taller than Clovis and technically older since he’d been lost in the Mechanism decades before she was. Clovis, however, had been a year or two older when the Mechanism took her. When it spat them all out together, none of them had aged, so he was the little brother. Now twenty years old, he was still the little brother, apparently.

Evar took the first blow on his shoulder, blocked the second, and found himself falling, legs swept from under him. He hit the ground hard and rolled away from the heel descending towards his face. The kick he aimed at his sister’s ankle somehow missed but gave him space to get back up. Or so he thought. Clovis closed the distance with remarkable speed, slamming her knee into his stomach.

“Get up!”

Evar lay gasping.

“Get up!” Clovis raged.

“Could you kill him a little more quietly?” Kerrol got to his feet, yawning, and stretched to his full height.

Clovis spun away from Evar to round on Kerrol. Their oldest brother was a good head taller than either of them, and wouldn’t last five heartbeats in a fight against Evar. Clovis would fell him with her first punch. Neither of them had ever laid a finger on him though. Words were Kerrol’s weapons, and he wielded them to devastating effect even in gentle conversation.

After a long moment of eye contact, Clovis looked away and spat to the side. “I’ve got an Escape to hunt down. We’ll train again tomorrow, Evar. Try not to be so pathetic next time.” She stalked away.

“I wouldn’t follow her,” Kerrol advised. “Starval says this Escape’s a big one. Particularly sneaky too.”

Evar watched Clovis walk away into the book stacks that surrounded them on every side. She wasn’t his true sister any more than Kerrol or Starval shared his blood. The only thing that made them siblings was that the Mechanism had returned them together, stumbling back into the library, wrapped in confusion. Of all of them only Evar had emerged from that grey womb without a gift of knowledge, and only Clovis had come out blood-stained and screaming.

“I worry about her,” Evar wheezed. He clutched his ribs and hobbled over to Kerrol.

“Of course you do.” Kerrol rolled his eyes.

He had once described Evar as burdened by kindness. If the library were to start to collapse, Evar, Kerrol said, would be too busy trying to mend whatever the world put in front of him to even notice the ceiling falling, let alone run for safety. It wasn’t a portrait of himself that Evar recognised—if the library started to fall, he’d be out through the first crack—but he had to admit that Kerrol’s assessments cut to the quick when it came to their surviving siblings.

Clovis had sheltered in the Mechanism to escape the massacre that had killed the rest of her people. While the sabbers had gone about their slaughter, the Mechanism had swallowed Clovis away. Untold years later it had returned her and the four boys it had taken earlier, spitting them out into a chamber populated only by bones and books. Kerrol said the attack might not have left scars on Clovis’s body, but it had left scars on her life, criss-crossing all her years, marked by the black days when she lay wounded, too dangerous to approach, beyond the reach of words. For all the sharpness of her combat skills she was, in conversation, a blunt weapon, and immune to the delicacy her injuries required if they were ever to heal.

Starval, who had emerged from the Mechanism as deft in matters of murder as Clovis was in combat or Kerrol in manipulation, mistrusted their brother’s skills. Kerrol, in turn, described Starval as hungry for meaning, looking for it in all the wrong places, thinking he might cut it from the world if only his knife bore a keen enough edge.

Evar had long since learned to keep interactions with Kerrol to a minimum. Anything you gave him could be ammunition, rope to hang you with later. He’d learned it from Kerrol’s own teaching. All of Evar’s siblings had spent years training him in their particular field of expertise. Evar had come to understand it as ultimately a selfish act. Each had honed their talent to an extraordinarily keen edge and had no audience for their skill other than the siblings with whom they were trapped. And the truth is that nobody can truly appreciate world-class talent unless they themselves have spent a great deal of time trying to be even a fraction as good. Evar claimed boredom led him to letting his siblings train him. The truth was that he enjoyed their company.

In any event, along with a considerable wealth of psychology, the main thing Evar had learned from Kerrol was not to underestimate his reach. His brother was flexible as water, capable of filling any hole in a conversation, flowing on, carrying nothing of it with him save for useful information, no more touched by passion or honesty than a river remembers its course.

Evar abandoned Kerrol to his reading and carried his exhaustion into the stacks. Clovis had left him too sore for sleeping. And besides, she might need help.

—

At the back of his mind Evar had the suspicion that Kerrol had sent him after Clovis. It was always hard to know with Kerrol. Evar shrugged it off and carried on, following the signs of his sister’s trail. She’d left faint hints at footprints in the thin layer of sooty dust that drifted here and there against the book towers.

Starval had taught him to track, though Evar could never track Starval. Second-best at everything. That was Evar. And a distant second place at that. Evar didn’t even know what book he had taken into the Mechanism on that fateful day, but it hadn’t given him a skill. He’d even proven himself to be bad at escaping.

The task of escaping the chamber was one that Evar had set himself very early on, and it had occupied him wholly for years despite the others calling it an exercise in futility.

He had read many books about people who had escaped from prisons, each prison more terrible and impenetrable than the next. It seemed to him that what had set apart those remarkable individuals who did indeed win free was that they all had something to escape for rather than from. A reason to aim themselves at. Unlike his three brothers and one sister, Evar had a reason. A better one than simply an unquenchable desire to know what lay behind each of the four white doors that confined them. A better one than the ache for new horizons or the need for any company other than that of his siblings. Evar had someone to save.

The library’s silence and the solitude of his walk polished the stone of Evar’s ever-present loneliness, burnishing it until it gleamed with a high shine. Evar’s parents, everyone he had known as a child, were long dead. Time’s tide had carried them off while Evar passed the decades away in whatever place the Mechanism had held him. He had few memories of the time before. The Mechanism had reduced that to a blur.

Of all of them only Clovis properly remembered the childhood she’d had before the Mechanism took her. She had been the last child the Mechanism took. The four brothers had been lost inside it years before, on separate occasions, separated by decades. Their disappearances had been random, unfortunate accidents that their people either forgot or considered a risk worth taking for the delights offered within.

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