Page 27 of The Book That Wouldn't Burn

Livira

For the last and steepest two hundred yards no houses bordered the road. A yawning cave mouth loomed ahead. Rubble strewed the slopes, broken rock and shattered masonry, not the weathered crags and boulders Livira could see further out.

“This is the entrance to the library?” Livira asked.

“One of them,” Yute panted. “It’s had different gatehouses over the centuries but they’ve each been pulled down in their turn. The mountainside was once carved to look like the face of a god, with the entrance as his roaring mouth.” He drew a few deep breaths. “It was a very unsettling sight... I imagine.”

“It looks like a mine.” Livira had never seen a mine, but Old Kern had once described the slate mine at Cernow to the settlement, and this fitted the picture his words had drawn for her.

“I suppose it does a bit.” Yute paused and leaned on his cane. “And we librarians are not unlike miners, given that we spend so much of our time digging and burrowing in the depths, hunting valuable nuggets.”

They passed several people coming down the path: two young men, a woman of middling years, a thickset man with greying temples, all of them wearing similar robes of light-blue wool. Yute returned their nods and Livira held the young men’s stares until they had the grace to look away.

“I thought there’d be more people...”

“The public entrance is further down the mountain. The foyer there is always crowded, and the front counter stretches for a hundred yards. People can request books there and once a librarian has recovered the tome in question it’s sent there to wait for them. This entrance is the one for staff.”

A guard stood to either side of the cave mouth, each wearing a steel breastplate chased with gold, far finer than Malar’s captain had worn. Both sported a cloak sewn with feathers, and their helms resembled owls’ heads, eyes circled in iron. The men had swords at their hips, but each held a long steel tube across his chest in both hands. They watched Livira’s approach and made no move to stop her entering. Livira stared back, widening her eyes in mimicry of their helms. Even as Yute led her between the guards she wasn’t sure why she’d stared them down—just that she always did it, she always fought back, and that all this newness, all this grandeur, seemed to scream that the place and everyone in it was better than her.

The paved path continued into the cave and led to a corridor at the back, precisely cut through the stone.

“That was a pair of the Library Guard,” Yute said as they left earshot. “A curious mix of the ceremonial”—he made ovals with finger and thumb and held them briefly to his eyes—“and the very latest innovations.” He mimed as if he were pointing one of the tubes down the corridor ahead of them. Livira liked that Yute didn’t take the guards as seriously as they appeared to take themselves.

In the stories caves were damp and dripping, or else filled with a charnel reek and the fumes of dragon breath. This one, however, was dry and smelled of nothing. Once in the corridor Livira could easily imagine herself back in the Allocation Hall. Yute led the way to a junction and from there through an increasingly complex maze of passages, with steps variously ascending and descending. They encountered more and more staff: a mix of men and women, some in blue robes, others in white, almost all of them in a hurry to get somewhere. Some were carrying a single book, others hefting whole piles of them. One woman in blue, hardly taller than Livira, pushed a wheeled set of angled shelves on which maybe fifty leather-bound volumes were supported. Livira pressed herself to the wall and the woman puffed past before spotting Yute and trying to arrest her progress. She dug in her heels and brought the cart to a white-knuckled stop inches before it would have hit Yute had he not already heard the squeak of her wheels and moved.

“I’m so sor—”

Yute halted her apology with a raised hand, gave a puzzled smile, and gestured that she should proceed.

Livira watched the woman hurry away. “Why are they all in blue or white and you’re in grey?”

“Blue is for general staff and trainees. More senior staff shade from white at the librarian level to black for the head librarian.” He took an unexpected left down the next side corridor and Livira swerved to follow.

“And if she’d hit you just then?” The woman had seemed genuinely worried.

“Well, then I might have been forced to reach for the sharpest weapon at my disposal.” Yute continued to stride forward and raised his arms as if he might be summoning a thunderbolt. “Sarcasm.”

Livira wasn’t sure what sarcasm was, but it sounded pretty bad.

She stared at his arms as he lowered them. Salt-white, the same as the rest of him. She would have thought in flesh so pale the veins would stand out like the city streets seen from the mountain, but none showed.

“Here we are.” The librarian stopped before a large oak door and rapped on it with the handle of his cane. “I’m going to leave you in the tender care of Heeth Logaris. I expect only to hear good reports about your behaviour.”

Livira looked up at him from beneath furrowed brows. “Really? Because I’ll try but—”

“Gods no!” Yute laughed, a surprisingly deep sound that didn’t seem possible from so narrow a chest. “That was sarcasm. Give him hell!”

The door opened enough for a man to poke his head out, a blunt bald head in this case, fringed with greying hair. The man’s gaze flitted towards Yute, and the door opened wide. “Master Yute, I wasn’t expecting...”

“Apologies for the interruption, Heeth. I’ve brought you a new trainee.”

The man before them was taller than Yute and remarkably broad in the shoulder. Had the fates not brought him to the library, Livira thought that he might have made a good wrestler. The robe stretched across those shoulders was a lighter grey than Yute’s, which Livira now understood to indicate lesser status.

Broad as he was, Heeth Logaris was not wide enough to block the doorway entirely and behind him Livira could see a large room in which children ranging considerably in age and all wearing blue tunics sat at desks heaped with books. Their work lay abandoned before them now as all had swivelled to try to glimpse the newcomer past their teacher.

Yute stepped aside, revealing Livira more thoroughly. “Here she is.”

The man’s pale eyes studied Livira, his bushy eyebrows elevated. “Another.” Something about the intensity of his stare betrayed the effort required to keep the word wholly neutral. “And this one is from the Dust...”

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