Page 121 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“Well?” Livira asked.

“I assume you’re talking about the pale boy you mentioned seeing in the past iteration of Crath City?”

“Duh.”

“Where everyone was dead?”

“Yes.”

“So, how did you know they couldn’t see you?”

Livira frowned. “Evar said nobody saw him when he went to the city years before that one. And in his sister’s past too.”

“Maybe this was different?” Arpix suggested.

“We were ghosts. I flew. I walked through walls!”

“And the boy definitely saw you?”

Livira gave Arpix a hard stare. “He was looking right at me.”

“Or right down the street?”

Livira bounced up out of the couch. “I don’t know why I came here.”

Arpix’s expression said that he also didn’t know, but he kept his lips pressed firmly together.

Livira pulled her robes tight and stalked towards the door.

“You told me that Evar said the assistants could see him when he was a ghost.” Arpix said it to her back.

She turned towards him. “I did.”

“And that two sets of children’s footprints led from pools of assistant blood right in front of where hundreds of them were watching over the city.”

“I said that too.” Livira nodded. “What does it mean?”

“I have no idea,” Arpix said.

“Me neither.” Livira went back to her bed.

—

Livira woke early the next morning, having been chased through the night by troubling dreams. She felt that she should have dreamed of Evar and wondered what it meant that she hadn’t.

Deputy Synoth had requested her presence in a note delivered during her absence the previous day, doubtless to do further work on his tedious reorganisation of the structural mechanics catalogues. Livira had other plans. Ignoring her duties, breakfast, and the fact that she still needed to somehow secretly return the book she’d stolen from the head librarian, Livira headed for the exit.

In the chilly morning light Livira stood amid the ruin of the wolf’s head gate. Some sabber god, she imagined. She could see hints of its form in the larger chunks of rock that still scattered the slopes. She stood for some while, pondering.

“You all right, Livira?” Jash Shuh left his post to approach her, his bushy moustache that had so amused her as a child now tinged with grey. He watched her questioningly from the shadows of his owl helm. The library guards’ helms had struck her as funny as a child too. Many things had.

“Things are so easy to see once you’ve been shown them,” Livira said.

“I guess so.” The man nodded thoughtfully.

“You can look forever and not find what you’re hunting. See something every day and not really see it. And then...”

“Isn’t that what the library does for us?” Jash asked. “Shows us things so we can see them? Reminds us what we’ve forgotten?”

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