Page 163 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“It’s a teaching story,” Livira said. “It tells us that often things don’t work out for the best. People die. Things get broken and can’t be repaired. It doesn’t matter how brave the prince is or how shiny his armour. It doesn’t matter how plucky the princess is or how unusual her hair might be. The fire comes and there’s no fighting it.”

“I don’t like it.” Evar shook his head. “There are blank pages left in your book—the Assistant told me—so there’s more we can do. We’re gods, aren’t we? We can fix this!”

“We’re gods in here.” Livira took his hand in hers. “We can’t fix the world, though. Nobody knows how to. We just have to do our best. Move on. Rebuild.”

“What are you telling me?” Evar looked ashen now, as if this fairy tale had suddenly become the whole of his heart. “I don’t arrive too late. I’m not going to. You’ve seen how fast I am.”

But Livira, who had no more than her fingertips still touching time’s flow, knew better than that. She saw the future stamped upon the face of the past, two sides of an ever-spinning coin. She understood the gift of purpose, the distraction it provided from the awful completeness of the circle. She knew the knight would find her broken no matter how fast he rode.

She squeezed his hand, blinded by tears. “Thank you for trying to save me, my love. But don’t forget to save yourself.”

—

The Assistant blinked and looked down at the book in her hand. She glanced up briefly at the Soldier. He held his silence but nodded. The Assistant opened the book and wrote with her finger across the middle of the sheet.

Evar! Don’t turn the page. I’m in the Exchange. Find me at the bottom

That done, she handed the book to the Soldier before the tendrils of story reaching from it could find new purchase and drag her into more heartbreak. “Come on.”

There was one more thing to do, and as so often before, a book would lead her to it. She had thought it would be this book, but the person who took it had discarded it, perhaps thinking it cursed.

The Assistant and the Soldier ran, chasing a new book. They were swift and tireless. They passed through the ferocity of the fire once more and got ahead of it. The Assistant couldn’t say why she pursued this particular book through the expanse of the library. A tawdry piece of fiction, a steamy romance written in a week by an author with a thousand titles to their name. But something drove her, and finding books was her business, so she didn’t fight it.

—

They found the book many hours later. It lay in the possession of a terrified young human female who in turn appeared to be the possession of a band of exhausted canith only half a chamber ahead of the fire and losing ground.

The canith—who had held stewardship of this corner of the library for at least as many years as the humans had down the millennia—saw the Assistant and the Soldier as a blessing rather than a threat. They fell to their knees, hands raised in supplication. Their priest broke her staff and offered her life for the part they had played in bringing fire to the library. They came, she said, not in anger against the humans, though King Oanold’s ancestors had driven hers from the city. They came because a foe harried them in the east. Sabbers against whom there could be no victory without the knowledge held here. The skeer, she said, were like no other, numberless and deadly. She cast down the pieces of her staff and begged the Assistant to save those with her.

“I will try.” The Assistant spoke above the roar of the approaching fire and inclined her head.

Quite what the priest imagined the pair might do against the hellscape rushing after them the Assistant couldn’t say. She doubted that any of them would ever have predicted her solution, even with a million years of guessing.

The Assistant advanced unopposed to the girl.

“Carlotte.”

The young woman, who had seemed stunned by the Assistant’s arrival, looked still more shocked at hearing her name on the Assistant’s lips. She stood as if paralysed while the Assistant reached into her elegant but tattered evening jacket and withdrew The Marquis and the House Reader’s Daughter, by Babran Cartlode.

Handing the book to the Soldier, the Assistant walked away from the girl. “Follow me.”

—

Whilst very few chambers held a Mechanism, the Assistant knew that there were an endless number of them throughout the library. The one closest to the human door on this world lay in a reading room in the chamber just ahead of them.

As they approached the corridor, with the Assistant and the Soldier in the lead with the canith party straggling behind them, the Assistant could see that her request had been acted upon. She could no longer remember why she had asked that the chamber be cleared, and all the books be stacked within the four access corridors, completely blocking them from wall to wall and floor to ceiling. It was not part of her timeless purpose. Merely some temporary thing. An eddy in the flow, there and then gone.

Hundreds of assistants had clearly been at work for many weeks, if not months. As requested, a narrow tunnel, barely big enough for a canith to crawl through, had been left along one side of the southern corridor. It was to this small entrance that the Assistant led the war band. The chamber behind them was half-aflame, orange tongues of fire reaching the ceiling, the flames in other places dark crimson and even blue, tainted by the chemicals in the books they devoured. The awful heat singeing the canith’s fur was perhaps all that kept them moving. Carlotte had passed out sometime previously and lay cradled in the Soldier’s arms.

“Go in.” The Assistant pointed for the Soldier to go first. She addressed the canith next. “The rest of you will need to block this tunnel as soon as you’re through. Fill it in completely or the fire will find a way past.” She dropped to the ground and began to crawl into the tunnel after the Soldier.

—

The assistants had taken their instruction literally. The chamber lay empty. Empty of books, empty of everything. Of the granite shelves that had filled the chamber floor to ceiling, only scatterings of gritty reddish dust remained, the stone removed with a wave of a white hand.

While the canith laboured to fill the tunnel, the Assistant helped Carlotte out into the chamber. They walked for several hundred yards.

“How long will we be here? What will we eat?” Carlotte asked weakly. “We can’t live off the centre circle forever.” She shuddered, as anyone who has had to use the circles for any length of time would. They were intended to prevent starvation, but only just, they were not intended to encourage habitation.

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