Page 23 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

The Escape bowed its head, straining its jaws as it tried to divide its prey into two. A thin hiss of rage leaked from the insect as unknown pressures failed to achieve its goal. With a toss of its head, it threw the Assistant a good fifty yards across the room then zeroed its black gaze on the spot where Evar had shown himself.

“We’ve got to move.” Starval released his brother and scurried away. “Stick with me.”

Evar was no stranger to playing hide-and-seek among the jumbled desks of the reading room, and Starval’s skills at both the hiding and the seeking parts were unsurpassed, but the Escape covered the ground with frightening speed, stepping over rows of double-stacked desks and staring down into the valleys between. Evar hadn’t ever had to consider such a high vantage point when concealing himself.

“Here!” Starval hauled him under a table. Despite being the smallest of the siblings, he had a wiry strength that Evar constantly underestimated.

The Escape hunted them through the desk maze, in some places crashing through walls and toppling stacks, in others picking its way delicately in an almost-silence broken only by the soft clicking of its armour. Starval led the way through tunnels they’d made long ago, back when they’d thought Clovis the scariest thing that would ever stalk them here.

“Can you kill it?” Evar whispered at Starval’s shoulder, crouched amidst a thicket of table legs beneath a thin wooden sky.

Starval produced one of his throwing stars with a flourish, a wicked piece of sharp iron fashioned laboriously from two book hinges. He had others that were cogwheels with sharpened teeth—source unknown. “Maybe.” He sounded doubtful. “But definitely not while keeping you alive at the same time.”

“Since when has that bothered you?”

Starval turned his head sharply and looked at Evar with genuine surprise. “You’re the only one I can stand to be around. I’d miss you.”

A black leg crashed through a desktop ten yards to their left. The Escape freed the limb with an irritated shake that sent half a dozen other desks tumbling away and rattled the brothers’ cover.

“This way.” As he crawled away Starval tugged on a cord. Evar hadn’t seen him do it but somewhere along their journey Starval must have tied the other end to a desk leg. The tug set off a collapse way off to their left and the Escape raced in that direction, scattering desks with such ferocity that they came raining down on all sides.

“We can’t do this forever.” Evar caught up with his brother. “And there’s no way we’ll make it down the passage without it seeing us.”

Starval was looking at his hands, both flat to the floor. “We may not need forever.”

Evar realised for the first time in all the panic of running and hiding that it was unusually gloomy beneath the desks. Normally the library’s light would be as bright in their current hiding place as everywhere else, but now there were mist-like shadows. More than that, they seemed to be moving, a slow tidal flow, most visible around Starval’s fingers. “It’s being drawn back in?”

Starval nodded. “With luck we can just wait it out.”

Evar frowned. It was certainly true that Escapes always liked to put a lot of distance between themselves and the Mechanism as soon as they got free of it. And Starval was pretty much an authority on creatures of the night.

“Where is it now?” Everything had gone worryingly quiet. Evar lifted his eyes above the fallen desk to his right.

“Idiot.” Starval hauled him down almost immediately.

In his brief glimpse across the reading room Evar’s gaze had followed the trail of scattered desks and fixed for a moment on the midnight mass of the Escape, blacker than a hole cut into the world, its prey all the more clear for that blackness. It had the Assistant in its jaws again. The sound of the first impact came as soon as Evar lost sight of the scene. A concussive blow like Clovis hammering her armour too close to his ears.

The sound echoed through him. For all that she seemed impervious, the Assistant gave him the distinct impression that if her limit of endurance was ever reached it would be sudden. There wasn’t any give in her, nothing left a mark, except for that one wound on her temple and the old cuts on her palms. The Escape smashed her into the floor a second time and Evar had a vision of the Assistant shattering like cast iron driven beyond its strength.

Evar found himself running towards her. What he might achieve he had no idea but staying put and watching apparently wasn’t an option. The library had given him few opportunities to test his bravery. In the stacks earlier he’d been terrified and had run to save himself. But here, with the Assistant at risk, it wasn’t even a choice, and he flung his own fragile body towards her seemingly indestructible one.

Starval’s shoulder hit the backs of Evar’s knees, taking him to the floor mid-stride. “You’re going to get us both killed.” Starval sent two throwing stars slicing through the air as the Escape’s head turned their way. One hit an eye and the other bedded into its jaw, but the thing lurched towards them even so, abandoning the Assistant. Starval threw again, exhausting his supply, and still the Escape came on, gaining momentum, desks hurled into the air on both sides as it rushed them.

“Run!” Starval slithered into the nearest cluster of desks. “Evar—”

The Escape came crashing on, the thunder of its approach drowning out anything else Starval might have had to say. The smoke from its wounds bled away in horizontal lines as if caught by a strong wind. Wherever Evar hid, the Escape would scatter his cover and devour him. With sudden inspiration he turned and ran across the clear ground, aimed directly for the Mechanism. The door was still closed but somehow the structure was sucking the Escape back in.

Evar sprinted, unable to look behind him, expecting jaws to close in on both sides at any moment. He felt the Escape’s cold malice focused on his back, aching between his shoulders. The din of its charge overwrote his booming heart and the labour of his lungs. Unwilling to check his speed Evar hammered into the Mechanism’s grey wall, taking the impact on his shoulder and hip as he turned to meet his fate.

The Escape had skidded to its own halt and stood about thirty yards back, legs rigid, slanted to resist the pressure that had darkness streaming from every surface, to be sucked into the Mechanism’s vortex. The creature trembled, the vibration fierce enough to blur its outlines. One foot—a hook bristling with black spines—slipped, only to regain traction a yard further forward. The smoke billowed from it, pieces of its exoskeleton ripping free and hurtling towards the grey wall at Evar’s back. Even as he ducked a large plate, the whole Escape disintegrated, the bulk of it sucked in on the Mechanism’s endless inhalation while some dark core found new form and fled towards the passage, aiming for the freedom of the stacks.

Evar shuddered as the wash of darkness flooded over him and was drawn away.

He was still trying to brush the invisible filth from his chest and arms when Starval reached him. “Are you insane?”

“I had to save her,” Evar said, feeling foolish.

“How? By temporarily blocking its mouth with your body?” Starval gestured towards the Assistant, now on her feet again and walking unhurriedly towards them. “It’s not as if she needed your help. Clovis couldn’t put so much as a dent in her even if she had all day and a big hammer...”

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