Page 161 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Livira

Livira stepped into the Exchange, finding it quiet, ordered, and strangely comprehensible, as if its mechanics were integral to her now, another part of her skin. She turned around to face the sphere of radiance out of which she’d just stepped. Humans were forbidden in the Exchange, so she redirected the gateway she had used, aiming it at a place and time.

A memory of the Exchange haunted her, but in it the Exchange had presented a different face, suited to her understanding as it was then. There were no pools or portals here, just the nexus, and only one nexus was required. It had been placed in a forest long ago once Irad understood that his library cast many shadows and had acted to connect them. To reach any particular world or time required only direction. The rows and columns that Livira and Evar had seen with other eyes were merely a projection, helping simpler brains to make sense of something occupying more dimensions than their thinking.

Since the nexus connected all parts of the library across worlds and time, the battle for the athenaeum’s soul lay written across its surface. The veins of Jaspeth’s influence pulsed like black lightning through the sphere’s light.

Within the Assistant, Livira counted as corruption, similar to Jaspeth’s pollution, though considered less hostile. More like a fever than a cancer. Even so, few of the Assistant’s abilities were at her disposal, and as she progressively lost her grip on time so all of Livira’s wants, desires, ambitions, loves, and friendships began to erode, sandcastles before the tide.

Livira reached for one of the few levers she could pull. Communication. She placed both white hands so that their palms touched the nexus, and she spoke to her fellow assistants, who were, in a manner of thinking, all shadows of the same original as herself. She asked for a service. And, since it involved only the moving of books, she hoped that they would not enquire too deeply or suspect her of being compromised by the human taint.

As the words left her mind, borne to countless assistants scattered across achingly large distances, so did her purpose. Images of people she could no longer name faded from her thoughts. Urgent tasks slipped away, her white fingers making no attempt to snatch them back. She drifted on a deep sea. As if she were a needle drawn by the lodestone’s pull, she turned to contemplate the perfection of the forest. Even in the darkness, with a chill wind questing through the leafless branches, it held a peace that seduced the mind. She could have stood there forever within the stolen moments that Irad had stitched together to make the Exchange. She could have stood, watching the shadows shift in the nexus’s glow, while years stole past behind her back unnoticed. But somewhere, somewhen, a book wasn’t burning.

Harboured in the assistant’s flesh, Livira knew all about books. She knew the location, disposition, and contents of so many books that, were they to be gathered in one place, the forces of gravity would fashion a sphere from them. She knew that the vast majority of those books were not on fire, and that was well. She knew that a small fraction, constituting an enormous number, were on fire, and that was part of the accord, the compromise that had avoided a Ragnarök and instead plunged the library into its state of eternal cold war. Undesirable but acceptable. And she knew that amid all those oceans of the written word there was just one book that should by rights be burning, and yet was refusing the flames.

Somehow the flames that should have been consuming those uncooperative pages were burning her instead, a fierce heat building inside her. So, instead of contemplating the darkness of the forest until the end of time, she turned to face the nexus once more and stepped back into it.

—

Livira clambered out of the pool of her own blood into the centre circle of the chamber she had bled in. Flames were dancing above the shelves to the south, their hunger drawing in the air as fast as the centre circle created it. The resulting draught had thinned the smoke to the point where she could see that the humans and the construct—Volente—were gone. And for reasons beyond her reach that created contentment inside her.

The Soldier had gone too. The circle lay empty of everything but smoke. Livira gazed once more at the fading portal she’d made then set off towards the book that wouldn’t burn.

She crossed two chambers before needing to enter the conflagration. The roar of the fire within the confines of the chamber overwhelmed all other sounds. When the aisles ahead of the fire’s advance burst spontaneously into flames, with such force that some books literally shot from the higher shelves and exploded into brilliant comets as their pages spread, Livira heard nothing but the roar. When shelving units two hundred yards long and taller than trees fell, disgorging their burning contents, Livira heard nothing but the roar.

The fire’s glow and heat reflected from the ceiling and glimmered across her skin. She entered the burning aisles, walking paths that lay hotter than the smith’s furnace where iron bends, and drips, and runs. Livira wasn’t immune to the inferno’s touch. The assistant’s enamel might have shrugged off temperature just as it let time slide away without leaving a mark, but Livira had alloyed her own spirit with the assistant’s substance, and it wasn’t an alloy that retained the full strength of the original. She felt pain. She felt the need to retreat. And yet above the fire’s roar she heard the call of the book that wouldn’t burn, and above the pain she felt the need to reach it.

In time she passed through the inferno’s heart and moved on through the devastation it left behind. She waded through waist-deep embers glowing the bright orange with which a furnace answers the bellows’ call. She strode through crackling ashes where the air shimmered and rippled as it baked. She walked on and came in time to a black mound no higher than her hip, and began to dig into it with her hands.

The Soldier lay beneath a yard of scalding cinder, as black as soot. She brushed away at the last inch still covering him. The side of his body that he had presented to the fire was still the yellowed ivory of before, streaked here and there with grey, but the kiln that the chamber had become had left a melted look to that half of him.

Without speaking, the Soldier levered himself up. Underneath him Livira’s book, which should be charcoal, lay unmarked.

“It can’t burn,” Livira said. “It exists in the future.”

“It can burn,” the Soldier corrected her. “But the future would burn with it.”

The Soldier picked the book up with fingers hot enough to melt glass and handed it to her.

For several heartbeats Livira was in two places at once. And then only one.

—

“Who lives in the tower?” Evar reached down to pick it up.

Livira slapped his wrist. “Don’t! You’ll break it.”

“I thought we were gods.” But Evar pulled his hand back.

“We are. For now.”

“Gods can’t pick up towers without breaking them?” Evar eyed her doubtfully, kicking at the ocean around his ankles.

“Don’t do that either! You’ll drown some sailors or squash a whale or something.”

Evar rolled his eyes.

“And of course we can pick up towers without breaking them. It’s just that there are more elegant ways of doing things.” Livira pointed at the tower and immediately both of them were shrinking and drawing closer to it. Where moments before they had needed to stoop to see below the clouds, now they both fitted on the windowsill of a room at the tower’s top, nestled below a tiled conical roof. Livira peered through the diamond-shaped pane in front of her. It stood as tall as she did and was one of scores leaded together to fill the window frame. Evar leaned in with her.

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