Page 20 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

“I’ve got a job for you,” Yute said over his shoulder. “At the library.”

Some words are so suited to their task that they keep their role within scores of tongues. Some sentiments transcend language. When spoken, expressions of love or hate rarely require translation for the meaning to penetrate.

The Common Roots of Etruscan and Old Miscenren, by Axit Orentooroo

CHAPTER 8

Evar

To discover that you can read a language you never knew existed is a surprise. To be instructed to stop reading, in person, in that language, on the first page of a book, is perhaps an even greater one. Evar attempted to stifle any reaction and, holding the volume at his side, followed Clovis as she led the way through the book towers. Evar had few secrets. It was hard to keep them from his siblings given their respective talents for violence, espionage, and manipulation. This particular piece of strangeness he wanted to have for himself for a while. It wasn’t just the revelation of his unsuspected skill or the fact that the book had addressed him by name. It was that when he had first set a finger to the cover something had struck him.

But it hadn’t ended there. Instead, as if some object had fallen from a great height into the centre of his being, waves had spread through Evar, moving through the unknown reaches of his self, lifting and rearranging as they passed. Even now he could feel the outer ripples, still running through the shallows of his dreaming.

“Keep up!” Clovis barked, accelerating into the Narrow Forest. The stacks here were all a single book thick, stretching yards above their heads. Evar focused on his path, weaving after his sister. The towers were easy to topple and as children they’d felled hundreds just for the fun of it, competing to see how many might fall as a result of a single well-judged push, one tower bringing down another, which in turn might knock over two more and so on. As he’d grown older, though, Evar had made the effort to preserve them. Not because they were in any danger of running out of book towers to fell, but out of respect for the effort that their construction had taken. And because the mystery of why his ancestors had invested their labour in such a manner remained unsolved. Even Mayland, who’d had intimate knowledge of the history of more civilisations than Evar could list, had had little to say on the subject of the centuries his own people had spent trapped within the library. It was, he declared, an irony of the greatest order that their ancestors had lived and died hemmed in by books and yet made no record of their own lives. Perhaps their surroundings had brought home to them how such an act would be the addition of a teardrop to an ocean. Hardly anything remained of them: no bones, and no artefacts that were not fashioned from what could be taken from the book stacks—save for three curved swords, one broken, all of them rusted beyond use, and a broken staff polished by the touch of innumerable hands.

Clovis drew close to the north wall and followed it east, breaking free of the stacks after a hundred yards. If Evar were to set his back to the wall and walk until he met the opposite one it would be a journey of around two miles. The prison that held them was large enough to contain a city but it was still a prison for all that, and one from which he had vowed to escape.

The area around the pool was already clear when, over a decade ago, and an age after the slaughter of their people, the Mechanism had spat out the five children who had for so long been lost within it. They had emerged with empty bellies and full minds, all save Evar who had no memory of his lost time.

Clovis had overseen the effort to enlarge the book-free area—exposing the lines of sight, she called it—and now the clearing lay a good two hundred yards across, surrounded by a chest-high bank of books. The pool lay at the centre, only two yards wide, easy enough to leap, but unknowably deep. A green halo of crops surrounded it, rooted in their beds of paper-mulch.

Mayland had always said that he considered the greatest mystery of the library to be the presence of a pool amid all these books, and the greatest mystery of their people to be not how they became trapped within the library but how they happened to be in fortunate possession of the seeds that would sustain them for generations. Clovis was more interested in what they had eaten before the first squashes ripened. Evar preferred not to know.

Kerrol rose to meet them, putting aside the great scroll he’d been working through, on and off, all week. He was the tallest of them, always well groomed though there was nobody to impress. The rest of them were prisoners of the chamber but Kerrol managed to give the impression that he was simply a guest, free to depart whenever he chose to. “What’s the excitement?”

Clovis shot Evar a rare conspiratorial glance. “There’s no hiding anything from our brother, always so perceptive!”

Evar managed a grin. Kerrol’s ability to read his siblings as easily as he deciphered the scroll before him irked them all—perhaps Starval the most. Secrets were his business, after all. And although Clovis mocked Kerrol, the fact was that no matter the manner of their return he would have known they had news. It might take him a while to get the detail out of them if they tried to hold on to it, but he’d have them talking soon enough. Kerrol knew exactly which strings to pull. How his methods might work on a stranger Evar didn’t know, but he’d been practising on his brothers and sister most of his life and played them with a virtuoso’s touch.

“The plan worked,” Clovis said. “I killed the Escape.”

Kerrol raised a brow. “And the other thing?”

Clovis hesitated, but Evar jumped in with all the enthusiasm he could muster. “We found the tallest tower ever. A giant! I knocked it down with my face.”

Kerrol’s other brow lifted to join the first. “Remarkable.” He frowned, as if sensing Evar’s ploy to bury news of the book beneath that of the Escape and the giant tower. His blue gaze found the volume held at Evar’s side. Perhaps he noticed the tightness with which Evar gripped it or maybe it was as his attention returned to Evar’s face that he found his clue as to its importance. “What’s the book about?”

Evar turned away without replying. The best defence against Kerrol was to be out of earshot. Failing that all you could do was refuse to reply for as long as you could manage and hope that his boredom found a new focus. He walked off towards the field where the Soldier was making his patrol, ever vigilant for weeds.

“Did you find it in this tower of yours?” Kerrol called after him.

With Kerrol it was always boredom rather than malice. With Starval it was harder to tell. The Soldier had a quote: Steel demands to be used. Which, according to him, meant that any weapon aches for violence and sooner or later that ache will pervade the one who owns it, until at last the weapon owns them. It seemed to Evar that it wouldn’t be until there were other targets beside himself that he would know where his siblings truly preferred to aim.

The Soldier paused his rounds hip-deep in new corn as Evar approached. The Soldier and the Assistant had raised Evar and his siblings. They had been all that was left when the Mechanism had regurgitated the children. Only Clovis—who had spent the least number of “outside years” lost within the Mechanism—held any substantial memories of the time before, and she claimed that neither the Assistant nor the Soldier had been part of the community she’d been born into.

The Soldier and the Assistant did not closely resemble the children. Even Starval was a head taller than their replacement parents, and although the essentials were there—two arms, two legs, a head, and so on—the details diverged. More importantly the Assistant and the Soldier were hairless, impossibly smooth, and their flesh-that-was-not-flesh had the colour of old ivory, yellowed with age, veins of grey running through them here and there. Their bodies were hard and cold, lacking pulse or heartbeat. Mayland had surmised that they were made things. Both of them not crudely carved but simply modelled on some idealised form, lacking detail or individuality, with only faint hints at gender to distinguish between them. That and the white sword the Soldier always carried.

Mayland’s suggestion was that they had been fashioned from the same stuff that had been used to construct the Mechanism itself—smooth, cold, and indestructible. That said, the Assistant did sport a puckered crater on the left side of her forehead, about the same size as a thumbprint, and slice marks across both palms. The Soldier was scorched across much of his right side, his flesh holding a melted look. On his face a narrow groove had been carved across his brow, cheekbone, and chin.

Given how much punishment Evar had seen the Soldier absorb without so much as a scratch when sparring with Clovis, he found his imagination failed him when it came to the forces that must have been used to inflict such visible damage.

“Evar Eventari.” The Soldier inclined his head, one ivory hand on the hilt of his sword. The Soldier was rarely anything but reserved, though it seemed to Evar that another personality would occasionally surface. Once or twice, when pushed particularly hard by Clovis in combat, he had seemed to come to life, something wilder and more raw taking possession of him, as if a fire had lit behind those white eyes. “You have a new book.”

“I do.” Evar blinked. The Soldier didn’t make small talk. Evar doubted the Soldier would comment if he arrived with the severed head of a sibling under one arm. But here he was, commenting on a book, in the library. Evar waited to see if there was more, but the Soldier simply watched him. The Soldier never told any of them to go away but somehow despite the lack of expression on his moulded features he managed to convey the sentiment with sufficient volume to stop even bored children from following him for very long. “I... uh... Clovis got the Escape.”

The Soldier turned his head to face the Mechanism even though it lay beyond sight a thousand yards off behind a great thickness of stone. “I will adjust my rounds accordingly.” He rotated and began to walk away, stepping between the rows of corn with unerring precision.

Evar hesitated, his eyes drawn to the black, unrippled waters of the pool. He shivered, the memory of its coldness somehow combining with that of the Escape attempting to speak his name.

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