Page 135 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

CHAPTER 56

Livira

We need to go.” Livira jumped the last ten feet from the shelves, going down on her haunches to absorb the impact, then rising swiftly. “There’s a fire.”

That set everyone talking at once. They were standing in a flammable maze amid four square miles of parchment, paper, leather, and wood, all dry as the Dust.

“We’ll aim for the door to Chamber Seven.” Yamala set off without delay.

Several of the librarians raised an eyebrow or two at the idea of entering a forbidden chamber, but Yute had said the door would be no problem.

Master Synoth did more than raise both bushy white brows. “I’ve been sixty years at this work, man and boy. And you’re telling me you could have let us into the locked chambers any time you liked?” He shook his head in slow outrage. “I wouldn’t have agreed with taking sabber prisoners to do it. Well... certainly not cubs. But if you could open them without the need for all that... for gods’ sakes, Yute...”

Yute walked past the old man, clapping him on the shoulder as he went. “You didn’t think you had enough to read already, my friend?”

Synoth managed a wry smile through his beard. “It’s always the books you don’t have that call to you, you know that. Not the ones already on your shelf. They can wait.”

It was Yute’s turn to shake his head as he walked away. “Even as a trainee, Synoth, even as a trainee. Always hungry for the next book before you finished the first page of the one before you.”

—

Livira worked her way to the front of the column. She was doubly glad now that she’d saved her story, but the idea that the whole chamber would just burn, the labyrinth gone, millions upon millions of books reduced to ash... it just seemed so wrong.

“How can they let it all burn?” she demanded.

“They?” Yute asked.

“Them! The assistants.” She waved her arms as if it might help. “You know. Like the one who somehow turned all these people’s food to dust by lifting his little finger. They can’t stop a fire... or just provide fireproof books?”

“Everything is a compromise.” Yute raised his hand so she could see over his shoulder the ring whose moonstone he had joked could hold every book in every chamber of the library. “The assistants are Irad’s servants. The dark that escapes from between, the blackness that’s the library’s own blood, is what Jaspeth bends to his will.”

Yamala glanced at her husband and tutted, as if she disapproved of such candour. Yute ignored her and carried on. “The library exists on the knife edge between their conflict—their disagreement. It hangs in a web of checks and balances. The library is both the tree and the apple. It offers not knowledge of good and evil but knowledge for good or evil. Of course fire could be forbidden. But one of the compromises that holds back the war—not your little one here, but the big one—is the agreement that if a civilisation is not capable of keeping a book from burning then perhaps it wasn’t ready for whatever knowledge was held within.”

“So... it’s all just going to burn then?” Livira couldn’t accept it. The idea hurt her inside her chest.

“I’m just glad someone thought to put these corridors and doors in,” Malar said behind Livira. “Without firebreaks it wouldn’t just be one chamber that went up. Then we’d all be fucking fucked, and no mistake.”

Yute did look round at that one. “The doors stop people. They don’t stop things.”

Malar’s face paled. “But there’s the corridor too. Two hundred yards.”

“When four square miles of books burn, Master Malar,” said the head librarian, her eyes firmly to the fore, “those corridors will become throats through which the inferno within will both inhale and exhale. And when it does the latter, flames will vomit into the next chamber further than a man can throw a spear.”

“Oh crap,” someone said from behind Malar, someone using Jella’s voice but obviously not Jella since she had never in her whole life used a crude word. “Can we go a bit faster, please?”

—

“You’re saying the whole library is going to burn?” Livira asked again.

“I don’t think you’ve understood how big the library is,” Yute said. “The library is always burning. Somewhere. The assistants restock behind the fires. It’s a—”

“A compromise. Don’t say it. I know.”

“I was going to say an equilibrium,” Yute said mildly.

“Well... can we outrun it?”

“Not for long.” Yute, and more specifically Yamala, had slowed. The head librarian seemed fatigued, though how two cuts to her hands could have left her so drained Livira didn’t know.

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