Page 160 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

In three quick strides Mayland came up behind Yamala and put his arm around her neck in the chokehold that Clovis had taught them all. Clovis and Kerrol stared at him open-mouthed. The humans noticing this new arrival, a hostile canith, backed away, more ’sticks being lifted among the soldiers’ ranks. Several of the owl-helmed ones actually stepped forward, clutching their ’sticks like drowning men clinging to silver ropes.

“Stay back, please,” Mayland instructed pleasantly. “And Kerrol, though I’ve missed your voice, I must ask you to stay silent or I’ll snap this one’s spine and be on my way.”

“Mayland?” Evar balanced simultaneously on the edges of elation, horror, and total confusion. For a moment he wondered if he’d been mistaken, and this was some other canith. In the ancient city he’d seen Mayland in the crowds, but not just Mayland, his imagination and lack of experience with faces had painted his siblings’ features onto anyone that looked even vaguely similar. But it was Mayland. Older, thinner, a ragged scar down the left side of his face, but Mayland nonetheless. The others saw it too. Those grey-green eyes, a little too far apart. The slight stoop in his back. That crooked mouth always hinting at a smile, rarely giving one.

“What are you doing?” Had Evar believed his brother to be alive then he would have put Mayland top of the list of his siblings least likely to resort to such methods. Ahead of Kerrol and then himself. Kerrol he always suspected of being bottled too tight to not one day explode, but Mayland surely knew more history than any ten historians and the lesson of many centuries had always been that violence breeds violence. “Let her go—she’s called Yamala—she was an assistant...”

It should have been enough to set her free, but Mayland simply tightened his grip.

Evar tried again. “She was an immortal servant of Irad. And she gave it up to save us.”

Mayland glanced to either side, ensuring nobody was sneaking up on him.

It didn’t work. Starval could sneak up on someone with eyes in the back of their head.

“Evar asked a good question.” Starval kept his knife at Mayland’s throat. “What are you doing, brother?”

Mayland smiled. “Fighting the sabbers.”

“She’s not one of them any more than she’s one of us,” Starval said.

“ ‘Sabber,’ dear brother, means ‘enemy.’ The library is our true enemy. It always has been. He sees it. Him over there.” Mayland directed his gaze towards Yute, who hadn’t moved a muscle since his wife had been seized. “Two assistants graced us with their presence, dipped their toes in time’s currents. And what did they end up doing? Working for the library. What vision, what imagination! They married each other and ran the human portal to the library. And this one—this one decided Irad had it right all along. She kept on feeding the poison to the children at her doors. Yute, on the other hand, had his doubts. There was trouble in paradise, separate beds, compromises, a semi-truce. Irad and Jaspeth in microcosm. One of them seeking to return to the fold, the other heading in the other direction, perhaps about to stage his own escape.”

Behind Yute, soldiers and civilians continued to escape through the distant portal, wanting no part of the magical forest or whatever this conflict was. Yute stepped forward, moving between his owl-helmed guards, lowering the barrels of their weapons with his pale hands. “Please let her go.”

“Why?” Mayland seemed unaware of the blade at his neck. “You don’t love her anymore.”

“I care about her deeply.” Yute was looking at his wife rather than Mayland.

“She stands for everything you’re against.”

“She has a different view.”

“You should fight for yours,” Mayland said. “You believe it. More than that: you know it to be true.”

“Compromises can be made. Compromises must be made.” Yute stepped out from between his guards, both hands open and raised before him.

“What do you think, Starval?” Mayland acknowledged the brother at his back. “Are there compromises in the business of slitting throats? Or is it all or nothing?” He reached up and took hold of Starval’s wrist, pulling it slowly but firmly away from his throat before returning his hand to the lock he had around Yamala’s neck. “My particular study is history, Master Yute. I know all about these cycles of destruction, the rise and fall of civilisations, the fire-limit—yes, I read about that in your own work. And what do you think I’ve learned from the untold numbers of books to pass before me, in themselves an infinitesimal fraction of what the library has to say on the subject?”

“I don’t know. Please release Yamala and tell me about it.”

“I learned that there’s only one history of any consequence, and that’s the library’s own. I learned that compromise”—he broke Yamala’s neck with a sudden motion—“is the cancer that consumes us.” Cries went up; weapons were raised again, Yute’s arms dropped like cut strings. “Jaspeth is right. Raze the library to the ground, dig out all traces of its legacy, and let the world run its course at its own speed untrammelled by memory. This”—he raised his arms and let Yamala’s corpse fall—“experiment is over.”

Somehow, in the face of Mayland’s confidence, only one of the guards made to fire. Starval’s arm snapped out and his knife blossomed from the man’s face. All around them portals started turning black, and Escapes began to clamber from them.

Evar’s gaze fixed upon his home pool, the only exit still to look the way it had the first day he came to the Exchange. The madness of the last few minutes had somehow pushed Livira from his mind but now she was the only thing on it. The only thing that made sense amid the chaos. Livira who had become trapped in the Assistant. Livira, the woman he’d been hunting all this time, who had haunted the edges of his dreaming since the day he had crawled from the Mechanism. And the woman who had been standing before him that whole while, lost in time, trapped in the ageless body she had stolen, caring for him day after day, while whatever love she might have for him stayed bottled up inside that ivory chest.

Evar tore across the grass, passing portal after portal. Nothing mattered except reaching the pool. Not the humans’ screams, not his “dead” brother’s plans, not the Escapes trying to block his path. He leapt at one, landing both feet against its face, carrying it to the ground and leaving it in his wake. Livira who he’d left alone to fight an unknown enemy, the skeer, just three of which had managed to put the Soldier on the ground.

“I left her.” He said the words as he dived for the pool. He couldn’t believe it. He had left her.

... irony or paradox?

To truly understand something you must see it whole. You must step outside the thing, outside the world that holds it, outside the time that counts its measure. Only when you stand outside the object of your interrogation and set God’s eye upon it will you understand that to know it properly you should never have left.

Within and Without, by Larry Mote

CHAPTER 69

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