Page 138 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

The first sabber leapt from a shelf top and landed among them, square in the midst of the clearing. Shouts on all sides, a ’stick boomed, screams went up. And the wave of smoke hit, pouring into the clearing like a waterfall, drowning everything in a hot, choking hell.

The idea that what was needed lay before us the whole time is almost as old as the concept of need. The greenest grass may hide beneath your feet.

“Three Billy Goats Gruff,” a postdoctoral thesis by Arnold Grim

CHAPTER 57

Evar

Evar pondered his three siblings. He needed their help if he was to get back to the Exchange, but he couldn’t allow Clovis to go there with him. She’d already spilled Livira’s blood and clearly planned to soak the Exchange’s grass with the rest of it. Even if Starval could and would put a knife in their sister’s back to prevent it, that was too high a price to pay. Better to not go back at all and live with the might-have-beens the rest of his days. Kerrol was the only one of them who could perhaps reach Clovis, but even his talents might not be sufficient to penetrate the scar-tissue around her psyche. Livira was by far the closest Clovis had ever been to exacting the revenge that had been the central column of her life for so many years.

The solution was clearly a plan that ensured Clovis didn’t make it through the pool. The problem was finding such a solution.

—

In the three days since discovering that the siblings now knew how to reach the Exchange the Assistant had created the pool only once a day. She took it upon herself to fill the drinking buckets, and then to water the crop while the Soldier guarded the gateway. If one of them should interrupt this process, with a question or idle chat, the Assistant would immediately return to the pool and make it vanish before addressing whichever sibling had interjected.

Time would not soften the regime or diminish their watchfulness. Neither of the two felt its flow. Evar was convinced of that now. Only his presence and that of his siblings caused the Assistant and the Soldier to dip into the now, as and when required.

Three days had taught Evar that whatever he told himself about it being better not to go back to the Exchange at all if doing so risked Clovis returning too, he could not remain. The entire time he had spent in Livira’s company had occupied just a handful of days, from when he entered the crop pool to when he once again emerged from it, dragged by his sister. But in those days Livira had grown from a child to a young woman who matched his age. She had struggled to reach him time after time, and succeeded though it took her years on each occasion.

His siblings would never understand how he had formed so deep an attachment over such a short span, but where a lifetime of seeking to return had served to sharpen Livira’s need, Evar had had her book. He had lived in it for as long as she had hunted him. She was the one he had been seeking, the one who had driven him to his quest to escape the chamber. She might hate him now—him and his kind—but despite what he had seen, and what he knew to be true of her species, he could do nothing but love, need, and want her. Whatever she looked like and whatever crimes her people had wrought, she was Livira, coiled around his heart, woven through his veins.

He would find her again, knowing himself to be vile in her sight, and say his piece. She could reject him, or merely stab him in the chest, but at least there would be an honest parting between them, not one forced by sudden circumstance. And having lived his life within the confines of a library Evar knew that endings were important.

—

“What we need,” said Starval when they had a chance to be out of Kerrol and Clovis’s earshot, “is a diversion so urgent that she doesn’t close the pool first. Urgent enough for both of them to run immediately to where they’re needed.”

“There’s nothing that important,” Evar said. “When have you ever seen either of them run?”

“I saw the Soldier run only the other day, chasing the third of those Escapes,” Starval said. “And I saw the Assistant fly through the air just before that.”

“You want an Escape to turn up just after she’s created the pool?” Evar asked. “What are the odds of that?”

“Not an Escape. Lots of them. And the odds will be pretty damn good if we make it happen!”

—

“We could just try talking to her.” Evar stood in front of the Mechanism, his arms folded defensively across his chest.

“When have you ever changed her mind on anything? Or seen her change it?” Starval looked back across the trail of upturned reading desks that marked the Soldier’s run for the main chamber when chasing one of the most recent Escapes.

Evar bit his lip and nodded. Not even Kerrol could change the Assistant’s mind. “You really think this is going to work?”

Starval adjusted his armour, which was made from more flexible leathers than Clovis’s, all of them black. “It’s the same book. If it doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”

Evar picked the tome in question off the nearest reading desk. A heavy book of indeterminable age, its cover a grey stone-like substance carved in deep relief with a border of vines and grapes. Starval had been secretly investigating Mayland’s disappearance, despite his stated belief that their brother’s bones would be found beneath a pile of books from one of the many stack collapses. The mystery had been too much temptation for someone who styled themselves as a spy. In addition to searching, Starval had been researching. The book he’d taken into the Mechanism the day that the huge insectoid Escape emerged had been the last book that Mayland had taken in with him.

Evar flipped through the pages. Books like this one, which talked about the library’s own history, were the rarest of finds. Mayland’s gift from his decades in the Mechanism had been a knowledge of history that would be insulted by the term “encyclopaedic.” But about the library’s history even Mayland knew little, and most of that was fable and surmise.

“Come on.” Starval hauled the book from Evar’s hands. “You’re not going to get far by actually reading it. Let the Mechanism do the work. Besides, it’s in Linear Krol.”

Evar frowned. Even Kerrol had struggled to learn Linear Krol, and all of them had complained at being forced to learn it because so few of the chamber’s books were written in the language. A memory nagged at him, scratching at the surface of consciousness but from the wrong side, as yet unable to be named.

Starval opened the Mechanism’s door, today a humble wooden affair, an untidy collection of planks that reminded Evar of the doors in the lower part of the city beyond the library. “Better get to your position. If it happens like last time we’re going to need to move fast.”

Evar stared at the grey interior. The last time he’d been in the Mechanism he’d been eight and it had taken away his life. “Let me go instead.”

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