Arpix rolled his eyes and started to cut away a section of his robe. “I’d use yours but mine is cleaner. Always.” He looked at her bare legs again, critically. “How’d you do it anyhow? You tried climbing those trees, didn’t you?”
Livira blinked. It actually was the sort of cut you might get falling out of a tree: any jagged edge or thorn might tear your leg on the way down. “Yes...”
“Idiot.” He started to clean the skin around the wound. “Did you find Evar?”
Evar is a sabber.
Livira considered lying. She didn’t want to talk about this. Not now. Not yet. Not ever really. “No. Someone very different.”
“Someone else?” Arpix poured half his water slowly over her leg, making her gasp.
Livira nodded and deflected him by describing the crowd of assistants she’d seen outside the wolf’s head entrance. Arpix carried on with his work, cutting her off before she could describe the strange pools and the small footprints.
“That’s the best I can do. Come on. Let’s see if you can stand.”
Livira started to get to her feet. “Of course I can stand— Oh! Shit on a stick, that hurts!” She welcomed the pain. Think about the pain.
Arpix took her arm. “Lean on me.”
Livira did as she was told, easing painfully into a standing position. Was Clovis’s ghost watching all this? Revelling in Livira’s discomfort, cursing that she’d not been able to inflict more grievous wounds. Fatal ones.
She was doing it already. Thinking about them again. About him. She tried an escape into facts and book learning. “You know what the sabbers call us?”
“No.” Arpix gave her a puzzled look, waiting for more.
“The same thing we call them. ‘Sabber’—it just means ‘enemy.’ ”
“That’s... interesting.” Arpix positioned her arm around his shoulders and took her weight.
“If you translated a sabber book into our tongue, we’d be the sabbers.”
“There are sabber books?” He looked doubtful.
“The sabbers held the city centuries ago. They ran it for years. Decades... I don’t know. A human army burned them out. Evar saw it.”
Arpix looked astonished but didn’t contradict her. Instead, he waited.
Livira shook her head. Her throat had grown tight, and tears prickled in her eyes. She didn’t want to think about it anymore.
Arpix broke the silence. “Where are your shoes?”
Livira noticed that she was barefoot. Her shoes were still in the Exchange, lying in the grass beside the pool that Evar had visited. Leaning heavily on Arpix, she hobbled around to look back at the portal, noticing that its light had dimmed, as if the power of the blood used to draw it were fading with time, or their transits had consumed some of the vitality that maintained the doorway.
Evar is a—
Livira refused the thought, seeking more distraction to replace it. “What’s that lot?” She nodded towards a stack of books just before the gateway. About as many as a man could carry without risk of dropping them.
“Arimistes’s Thesis on Library Time, Dorgon’s Lost Chambers, Lady Wentwood’s Memoriam—”
“What?” Livira swung her head towards Arpix, their noses almost touching. He’d named two of the books at the top of her search list along with one from the top of his own.
“It works!” Arpix grinned. “You can name any book you want, and an assistant will leave it by one of the portals. Ethwin Dorgon’s book came from a portal off our world line. It smells a little strange...”
It had been on Livira’s mind for an age that she might be able to get the books she couldn’t find in the library by using the Exchange, just as she’d got hold of Reflections on Solitude half a lifetime ago. But both her visits since that first time had been too filled with danger and intrigue to get around to such experimentation. Both had been cut short in dire circumstances too. Arpix, however, had clearly been drawn to a time of peace, one in keeping with his nature, and had come back with a pile of wonders.
“I’ll have to leave them behind, of course.” Arpix steered her from the books. “We’d be hard pressed to carry them between us even if we were both uninjured.”
“Wait! No! I can walk.” Livira put her weight on her bad leg and tried to stifle her groan of pain.